The Book Therapist, 249 UCB, Boulder (2025)

10/22/2025

Emotions don't come with instruction manuals.
And when the big ones hit—the grief after loss, the rage at life's unfairness, the fear that threatens to swallow you whole, it's easy to feel completely lost.

Sometimes I'd shut down. Sometimes I'd cry until I had nothing left. Sometimes I'd just go numb because feeling anything seemed too dangerous.
But over time, I learned there's another way. A way that honors what you're feeling without letting it consume you. A way that turns overwhelming emotion into clarity, healing, and growth. It starts with a pause. And it ends with freedom.

Here's the path that's helped me move through the hardest feelings—one step at a time.

10/22/2025

A Rainy Day, A Quiet Corner And A Good Book Are The Best Ingredients For A Perfect Escape

10/22/2025

I was eight years old when my mother died.
For months after, I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember exactly how her voice sounded. I'd cry into my pillow, whispering into the dark, wishing—aching—for just one more conversation. One more "I love you." One more chance to hear her call me for dinner, or sing me to sleep, or tell me everything would be okay. The episodes became less dramatic as I grew older. The tears came less often. But the longing? That never left. It just learned to live quietly inside me, a constant companion I carried into adulthood.

So when I saw The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom on Audible, something in my chest tightened. The premise alone felt like it was written for the eight-year-old in me who still, decades later, craves my mother's voice more than anything else in this world. What if the phone rang, and it was her?

I had to know what Albom had to say about that impossible, beautiful wish. From the first chapter, I knew this book would undo me. The narration was soothing! As I listened, I found myself not just hearing a story, but living inside my own memories. Every page, a reflection of my deepest longings.

The entire experience was reflective in a way I didn't expect. I'd pause the audiobook and just sit there, thinking about my mother. About loss. About what I believe happens after death. About whether love really does transcend the grave, or if that's just something we tell ourselves to survive the unbearable weight of goodbye.

Albom's goal isn't to give you easy answers. He gives you space—space to feel, to question, to hope, to grieve all over again. The story takes place in Coldwater, Michigan—a small town thrown into chaos when residents begin receiving phone calls from deceased loved ones. Tess Rafferty hears from her mother. Katherine Yellin from her sister. Jack Sellers from his son. The voices are unmistakably theirs, speaking reassurances from heaven. The world watches as Coldwater becomes ground zero for either a miracle or a hoax.

At the center is Sullivan "Sully" Harding—a former pilot drowning in grief after losing his wife Giselle in a plane crash he was blamed for. While others receive calls from heaven, Sully hears only silence. Enraged and skeptical, he sets out to expose what he believes is a cruel fraud, only to discover truths that challenge everything he thought he knew about loss, faith, and love.

Here Are Five Truths That Stayed With Me As The Story Unfolded:

1. Grief is the price we pay for love—and we'd pay it again.
Watching Tess Rafferty clutch her phone, waiting for her mother Ruth's next call, I saw myself at eight years old, wishing for the same impossible thing. Albom captures how grief isn't just sadness—it's longing. It's the ache of wanting to reach across an impossible distance and touch someone who's no longer there.

Tess doesn't want to "move on." She wants her mother back. Jack Sellers doesn't want closure about his son Robbie. He wants to hear his boy's laugh again. Katherine Yellin finds herself transformed by conversations with her sister Diane, clinging to every word like a lifeline.

These characters taught me something I'd forgotten: we don't grieve people we didn't love deeply. The pain is proof of the love. And listening to their stories, I realized I'm not alone in that desperate, irrational wish to hear my mother's voice again. We grieve because we loved. And given the choice, we'd choose to love them all over again, even knowing how much it would hurt to lose them.

2. Faith doesn't require proof—it requires courage.
The townspeople of Coldwater are torn between belief and skepticism, and Albom shows how faith is less about certainty and more about trust. Katherine believes the calls are real because she needs to. Pastor Warren struggles because his entire theology is being tested in real-time—are these calls a blessing or a distraction from genuine faith?

And then there's Sully, who doubts because he's afraid of being hurt again. If heaven is calling people, why not him? Why hasn't Giselle called? His anger at God is palpable, raw, real.

But faith, Albom suggests, isn't about having evidence. It's about standing in the unknown and choosing hope anyway. It's Katherine believing even when others mock her. It's Elias Rowe finding forgiveness through calls from his deceased friend Nick Joseph, even when he can't explain how it's possible.

Listening to this book, I found myself asking: What do I believe? And am I brave enough to believe it even when I can't prove it?

3. Miracles don't unite us—they reveal us.
This was one of the most painful insights for me. When hope enters Coldwater, it doesn't bring people together—it tears them apart.

Some, like Tess and Jack, worship the miracle. They organize gatherings, share their experiences, become beacons of hope for others. Others attack it viciously, calling them delusional, accusing them of fraud. Media vultures descend on the town. Opportunists set up booths selling "heaven connection" merchandise. Churches overflow, but so do protests.

And in the middle is Sully, watching this circus with mounting fury. He sees how the calls are being exploited, how desperate people are being manipulated. His investigation reveals the machinery behind some of the deception, but it also reveals something more troubling: how quickly people abandon reason when they want to believe.

Both the believers and skeptics are driven by the same thing: fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing control. Fear of hoping too much and being crushed when hope fails. The phone calls become a test—not of whether heaven is real, but of who we are when faced with something we can't explain.

4. Sometimes the miracle isn't the call—it's what the call makes you remember.
Albom weaves this idea so gently through the narrative that you almost don't notice it until it breaks you.

Tess doesn't just hear her mother's voice—she remembers her mother's love, her wisdom, the way Ruth made her feel safe in a chaotic world. The calls remind her of who her mother was, and in turn, who she became because of her mother.

Jack doesn't just talk to Robbie—he's reminded of what it felt like to be a father, to have purpose, to love someone more than himself. Before the calls, he was barely existing. After them, he's alive again, reconnected to the part of himself that Robbie brought out.

Katherine finds peace not just in Diane's words, but in the memories they unlock—summers together, shared secrets, the bond that made them more than sisters, made them best friends.

Even Sully, in his rage and investigation, is forced to remember Giselle—not just the trauma of losing her, but the beauty of having loved her. The calls—real or not—reconnect these people to something deeper than proof. They reconnect them to love.

And listening to this, I realized: I don't need a phone call from heaven to feel my mother's presence. She's already in me. In my choices. In my voice. In the way I love my own family. The miracle isn't in supernatural communication—it's in the fact that love changes us so profoundly that the people we've lost continue to shape who we are.

5. Love is the only thing death can't touch.
This is the truth that sits at the soul of the book, and it's the one that left me breathless.

Sully's entire arc is about learning this lesson. He spends the whole story searching for Giselle in phone calls and explanations, only to discover she's been with him all along—in his memories, in the values she taught him, in the way he loves their son Jules. His breakthrough comes not when he receives a call from heaven, but when he realizes that Giselle never left him. She lives in the man he became because of her.

Whether the calls in Coldwater are divine intervention or human deception doesn't ultimately matter. What matters is this: the people we love never truly leave us. They live in our memories, our habits, our hearts. Death ends a life, but it doesn't end a relationship. The bond remains. The love remains.

Tess will carry her mother's wisdom. Jack will carry his son's joy. Katherine will carry her sister's courage. And Sully will carry Giselle's love.
And that—that—is the real miracle.

Mitch Albom has created characters so vivid, so broken, so beautifully human that you'll see yourself in every one of them. Whether you're Tess, desperately clinging to hope, or Sully, furiously demanding answers, or Katherine, quietly finding peace in mystery—there's a place for you in this story.

If you've ever lost someone and found yourself wishing for the impossible, this book will meet you exactly where you are. It won't tell you what to believe. But it will hold space for your grief, your hope, your questions, and your faith.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3WTVp5a
Enjoy the audiobook with a membership trial using the same link.

10/22/2025

I once knew someone who kept a sweater in the back of their closet for two years. Not because they liked it—they never wore it. But because it still smelled like someone who promised to stay. They told me they'd catch themselves opening the closet door sometimes, just to remember what it felt like when that promise was still real. "I know it's pathetic," they said, laughing in that way people do when they're trying not to cry. "But I don't know how to throw it away. It feels like giving up on us completely."

I understood. Because I've been there too, not with a sweater, but with a playlist I couldn't delete, a coffee shop I kept avoiding, a future I had planned in such vivid detail that dismantling it felt like dismantling myself. We all have our version of that sweater. The thing we hold onto because letting go feels like erasing proof that we mattered to someone, that what we felt was real.

Heidi Priebe's This Is Me Letting You Go is for everyone who's still holding that sweater. For anyone who's discovered that the hardest part of losing someone isn't the goodbye—it's figuring out how to exist in a life you built expecting them to be in it. This isn't a book about getting over someone. It's a book about learning to carry loss without letting it destroy you. Priebe writes with the kind of aching clarity that only comes from having stood exactly where you're standing—in that terrible space between who you were with them and who you must become without them. She doesn't sugarcoat the journey. She honors its brutality while illuminating the hidden path toward wholeness.

Here are 6 truths that will change how you see heartbreak:

1. Letting go means releasing your grip on a ghost
They still live in your muscle memory—the way they laughed, the precise weight of their hand in yours. Priebe doesn't ask you to erase them. She asks you something harder: to stop replaying the relationship on an endless loop, searching for the moment you could have changed everything. The past is not a puzzle to solve. It's a story you must finally stop rewriting.

2. Some loves are meant to transform us, not keep us
We've been taught to see endings as failures, as if love only counts when it lasts forever. But Priebe offers a different truth: certain people enter our lives to crack us open, to show us what we're capable of feeling, to break us in ways that ultimately make us braver. When they leave, they're not taking their purpose with them. Their purpose was the breaking. The healing is yours alone.

3. Denial is a cage disguised as hope
There's a particular torture in waiting—for the text that will never come, the realization they'll never have, the love that will never return. Priebe refuses to let us hide there. She demands we look at the truth without flinching: It's over. Not because you weren't enough, but because sometimes love isn't sufficient. This confrontation with reality feels like dying. But it's actually the moment we start choosing life again.

4. You were never theirs to complete
The most insidious lie heartbreak tells us is that their departure revealed something defective in us—that if we had been different, better, more, they would have stayed. Priebe dismantles this fiction with surgical precision. You are not a half searching for wholeness in another person. Their leaving proves nothing about your worth. It only proves they were not meant to stay.

5. The depth of your grief measures the breadth of your capacity to love
We live in a culture that treats sadness like a problem to fix, a weakness to overcome. But Priebe reframes devastation as evidence of something extraordinary—your ability to love without reservation, to risk everything, to feel fully. That ache in your chest isn't pathology. It's proof that you loved someone with everything you had. And that kind of courage deserves reverence, not shame.

6. You must become the ending you're waiting for
We tell ourselves the pain will end when they finally apologize, explain, acknowledge what they destroyed. We wait for permission to move on. But Priebe delivers the truth we need, not the comfort we want: no one is coming to release you from this. Closure isn't something they give you in a final conversation. It's the morning you wake up and decide you're done asking questions only they can answer. It's choosing your future over their ghost.

This Is Me Letting You Go won't make the pain disappear. But it will teach you how to stop abandoning yourself while waiting for someone else to come back. It will show you that survival isn't about forgetting—it's about finally, devastatingly, beautifully choosing yourself.
And one day, you'll realize you haven't thought about them in hours. Then days. Then you'll understand that letting go wasn't losing them. It was finding yourself again.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/42U0NZL
Enjoy the audiobook with a membership trial using the same link.

10/22/2025

Dedicate The Next 11 Days into Staying Disciplined

10/22/2025

You've say the same thing five times, and your child still wouldn't listen. Or maybe they are—but instead of cooperation, you get eye rolls, tantrums, or stone-cold silence. The gap between what you mean and what they hear feels impossible to bridge.

Here's what Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish discovered: the issue isn't that kids won't listen. It's that we haven't learned to speak their emotional language. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk rewrites the script entirely—offering parents a path to turn everyday friction into genuine dialogue, and resistance into mutual respect.

This book isn't about being softer or stricter. It asks you to be smarter about connection. Here are 5 game-changing principles that make it possible:

1. Validate Emotions First, Solve Problems Second
Your child's meltdown over a broken crayon isn't really about the crayon—it's about feeling powerless or overwhelmed. When we rush to fix things ("Just use another one!") or dismiss their reaction ("Stop making such a fuss"), we miss the real need: emotional acknowledgment. Try mirroring their experience instead: "You loved that color, and now it's broken—that's really upsetting." This simple recognition often diffuses the storm faster than any solution could.

2. Swap Commands for Choices
"Go brush your teeth this instant!" rarely inspires cooperation—it inspires power struggles. The authors suggest reframing directives as collaborative statements: "Your toothbrush is waiting. Want to race me there, or should we brush together?" By offering autonomy within boundaries, you preserve their dignity while still guiding behavior. The goal shifts from obedience to willing participation.

3. Spotlight Effort, Not Identity
Generic labels—whether glowing ("You're so talented!") or critical ("You're such a mess")—trap children in rigid self-concepts. Faber and Mazlish champion descriptive observation: "You spent twenty minutes organizing your bookshelf by color—that took real patience." This approach celebrates what they did, not who they are, giving kids the freedom to grow without the pressure of living up to—or down to—a fixed image.

4. Co-Create Solutions, Don't Dictate Them
When the same battles repeat—morning routines, chore wars, sibling rivalry—shift from judge to facilitator. Gather everyone involved and ask: "This pattern isn't working. What could we try differently?" Let children contribute ideas, even imperfect ones. When they have skin in the game, they become invested in making things work. Plus, you'll be amazed at the creative solutions they generate when given the chance.

5. Demonstrate the Character You Hope to Cultivate
Your children are watching how you handle disappointment, mistakes, and conflict—not just what you tell them to do. If you want them to apologize sincerely, they need to see you own your errors. If you want them to manage frustration, they need to witness you taking deep breaths instead of slamming doors. Faber and Mazlish remind us: hypocrisy kills credibility. Authenticity builds it.

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk offers a philosophy of mutual dignity. It proves that we don't need to choose between being heard and being kind, between having authority and having closeness. When we adjust our approach to honor both our needs and theirs, something remarkable happens: children become more cooperative, confident, and connected. And we rediscover what drew us to parenthood in the first place—the joy of truly knowing the people we're raising.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/49lUNg6
Enjoy the audiobook with a membership trial using the same link.

10/22/2025

Those who've walked alongside a canine companion understand their uncanny perceptiveness. Before a single syllable escapes your lips, they've already decoded you—interpreting your body language, vocal nuances, and the silent weight of unspoken emotions. These instances feel borderline supernatural, as if our canine friends pierce through our carefully constructed facades to glimpse the raw reality underneath.

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, Kevin Behan transforms this familiar magic into something revolutionary. Building on years of hands-on work as a behavioral specialist, he demonstrates that dogs function as emotional reflectors, existing not merely alongside us but in resonance with us, absorbing our feelings—including those we barely admit to ourselves. When a dog exhibits nervousness, aggression, or detachment, it frequently signals something brewing in their human's psychological landscape.

Behan's central thesis is simultaneously grounding and liberating: our dogs are sculpted by our presence, yet they simultaneously illuminate who we truly are. Instead of treating unwanted behaviors as malfunctions requiring repair, he encourages us to consider what they're teaching us about our insecurities, pressures, and concealed realities.

Here are 6 transformative insights from the book:

1. Dogs Mirror Our Inner Climate
Central to Behan's worldview is the understanding that dogs don't simply occupy our physical spaces—they inhabit our emotional atmosphere. They synchronize with our feelings, frequently with greater clarity than we manage ourselves. A fidgeting dog might be shouldering an owner's unvoiced worry. An aggressive dog could be amplifying their person's buried dread of abandonment or inadequacy. This mirroring isn't about assigning guilt—it's about cultivating consciousness. Dogs project what lives inside us, enabling clearer self-perception. They demonstrate that suppressed feelings don't simply disappear; they radiate outward, influencing not just ourselves but those in our orbit.

2. Intention Outweighs Instruction
Dogs are virtuosos at decoding energetic signals. A forceful directive may be dismissed if it vibrates with uncertainty, while a gentle phrase delivered with unwavering composure often registers as undeniable. For dogs, emotional alignment trumps volume or reasoning. They gravitate toward genuineness, toward a grounded quality that feels stable and truthful. This principle challenges us to observe our own contradictions—when our language expresses one message, but our essence broadcasts another. Through this lens, dogs call us toward coherence, urging us to harmonize our internal reality with our external expression, not merely to earn their confidence, but to achieve our own inner equilibrium.

3. Relationship Supersedes Dominance
Here are 6 transformative i from the book:s, but Behan recalibrates the perspective: dogs don't flourish under domination—they flourish through relational depth. A foundation built on security and mutual understanding makes cooperation an organic consequence, not a coerced result. Authentic guidance, he proposes, concerns creating harmony more than exerting force. Just as with human interactions, allegiance forged through intimidation fractures under pressure, while allegiance nurtured through mutual respect persists. Dogs teach us that meaningful connections emerge not from power plays but from attentiveness, consistency, and the courage to truly listen beyond verbal exchange.

4. Dogs Illuminate Our Disowned Territories
This stands as one of Behan's most striking revelations: dogs embody what we reject in ourselves. They carry our "shadow material"—the feelings we disavow, the truths we bury. If rage frightens us, our dog might display greater aggression. If we sidestep confrontation, our dog may bark to establish boundaries. By externalizing what we repress, dogs serve as windows into our unconscious, presenting realities we'd prefer to ignore. It can feel unsettling, even jarring, but it's also profoundly valuable. Within their actions lies a pathway toward integration—a recognition that restoration begins when we acknowledge the dimensions of ourselves we've muted.

5. Anxiety Transmits Through Connection
Behan reimagines the leash as something beyond a practical device; it becomes an emotional channel. The instant our grip tightens with apprehension or dread, that energy surges directly into the dog. Suddenly, the leash pulses with strain, and the dog mirrors it—lunging, yanking, bristling. Many handlers interpret this as the dog's issue, but Behan proposes it reflects their own disquiet. To stabilize the leash, one must first stabilize oneself. This reveals that genuine leadership isn't about domination but about centeredness. The leash transforms into a symbol for existence itself: when we operate from tranquility, we generate tranquility; when we operate from fear, we transmit it onward.

6. Transformation Emerges Through Union, Not Correction
Perhaps Behan's most touching principle is that dogs aren't riddles demanding solutions, but allies in mutual restoration. Too frequently, we approach "problematic behavior" as something requiring adjustment, as if the dog were a malfunctioning device. But what dogs genuinely crave isn't flawlessness from us, but authentic engagement with us. They yearn for our transparency, our readiness to embrace vulnerability, our willingness to appear as we genuinely are. When we abandon attempts to repair and embrace attempts to relate, the shift benefits everyone. The nervous dog relaxes; the anxious owner finds breathing room. Restoration isn't unidirectional—it circulates in the realm where authenticity and companionship converge.

Your Dog Is Your Mirror is a meditation on kinship, authenticity, and wholeness. Kevin Behan reveals how every tail wag, bark, or glance carries meaning beyond the obvious—our dogs mirror not just their nature, but our own. They reflect our fears, desires, and hidden strengths, urging us toward greater courage, tenderness, and honesty.

To live in harmony with a dog, Behan suggests, is to live in harmony with the parts of ourselves we often overlook. Seeing them clearly deepens our self-understanding; earning their trust strengthens our inner trust; and being present with them teaches us true presence. This book is an invitation to honor the profound bond between human and canine—and through that reflection, to become more whole, free, and compassionate beings.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4hnfCK5
Enjoy the audiobook with a membership trial using the same link.

10/21/2025

Something fundamental has shifted in how children grow up today. Across homes, schools, and hospitals, a pattern has emerged that's impossible to ignore: teenagers are struggling with anxiety, depression, and loneliness at unprecedented rates. Bright, capable young people seem more fragile, more overwhelmed by ordinary challenges, more disconnected from the world around them.
The question everyone is asking is: why now?

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt offers a compelling answer. Somewhere between 2010 and now, childhood was quietly rewritten. We traded playgrounds for screens, boredom for endless scrolling, scraped knees for perfect safety. But in gaining convenience, we lost the very experiences that build confidence and resilience.

This isn’t a call to fear technology, but a call to remember what children truly need. Haidt shows that today’s struggles aren’t random; they’re symptoms of a world that has stripped away adventure, friendship, and real-life challenge. Yet he doesn’t leave us hopeless. He reminds us that our kids aren’t broken—the system is.

The way forward isn’t about perfection, but courage: small, intentional choices to bring back what matters. It’s about saying, not yet, not my child, and reclaiming the wonder and freedom of growing up.

Here are 6 empowering insights from The Anxious Generation:

1. Smartphones are stealing childhood.
Haidt reveals the profound shift from a childhood of exploration to one dominated by screens. Once, children learned through climbing trees, inventing games, and navigating conflicts in person. These experiences nurtured independence, resilience, and creativity. Now, phones offer constant stimulation but no real growth. They tether kids to comparison, distraction, and passive consumption. What looks like harmless entertainment has replaced the very conditions that allow children to flourish. The tragedy is not just lost time—it's lost development.

2. The rise in teen mental health struggles is no accident.
The crisis in youth mental health is not random or mysterious. Haidt shows how the sharpest spikes in anxiety, depression, and self-harm align with the spread of smartphones and social media in the early 2010s. Algorithms engineered to maximize engagement feed insecurity and erode self-worth. Every notification, every "like," subtly rewires the brain to crave validation and fear rejection. This fragile, externally driven sense of self leaves young people vulnerable to despair. We are not dealing with isolated cases—we are witnessing a cultural epidemic fueled by design.

3. Children need risk to grow strong.
In trying to shield children from harm, society has deprived them of the very challenges that build courage. Haidt emphasizes that real growth requires scraped knees, arguments on the playground, and moments of fear overcome. Risk teaches children problem-solving, emotional regulation, and resilience—the very qualities they need to face adulthood. By keeping kids indoors, supervised, and entertained by screens, we have robbed them of their training ground. Anxiety thrives in the absence of lived experience.

4. Social media is not truly social.
Though marketed as connection, social media often creates the opposite: loneliness. Haidt reminds us that human connection is embodied—it lives in touch, tone, laughter, and the subtleties of presence. Online interactions flatten these rich dimensions, leaving children with the illusion of belonging but the reality of isolation. Worse still, the constant comparisons amplify envy and insecurity, warping friendships into contests. True social life is built in parks, sports fields, living rooms, and classrooms—not in curated feeds.

5. Parents must stand guard with courage.
It is not easy to resist the cultural tide, especially when "everyone else's kids have phones." Haidt acknowledges the pressure parents feel but insists that boundaries are acts of love. Delaying smartphones, setting limits, encouraging outdoor play, and fostering community are not punishments but protections. He urges parents to form alliances—to agree, together, that they will not hand their children over to a system designed to exploit their vulnerabilities. Courage is contagious, and when parents unite, they can reclaim control of childhood.

6. The future is still ours to shape.
Perhaps Haidt's most hopeful insight is that this crisis is not irreversible. The screen takeover of childhood was sudden—and so too can be its undoing. Families, schools, and communities can choose to carve out spaces for real play, curiosity, and face-to-face connection. Change will not come from grand policies alone, but from small daily choices: saying "no" to endless scrolling, "yes" to outdoor adventures, and "let's try" to challenges worth facing. The anxious generation can become a resilient one, but only if we act with intention now.

The Anxious Generation is both sobering and empowering. It exposes just how deep the crisis runs, but it also hands us the tools to turn the tide. For every parent or teacher who feels powerless, this book is a reminder: it's not too late. We still have the chance to give childhood back to our children.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/43wd9Y6
Enjoy the audiobook with a membership trial using the same link.

The Book Therapist

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