The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
The most accessible introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in print. Particularly useful if you have noticed that trying harder to feel better tends to make things worse.
Anxiety & Panic Therapy →Two Shelves
Recommended Reading
A short, honest list of books that are actually recommended in sessions and supervision.
This page exists because the same handful of books come up again and again, and it is easier to point somewhere than to remember titles at the end of a session. It is deliberately short. A reading list that runs to fifty books is a list nobody uses.
Nothing here is a substitute for therapy, and reading is not homework. Some of these books are difficult in places, particularly the trauma titles and there is no obligation to have read any of them before we meet. There are no affiliate links on this page and I receive nothing if you buy any of them; your local library will have most of them.
For clients and general readers
Books that people in therapy often find useful between sessions. None of them replace therapy, and none need to be read before starting.
The Compassionate Mind
Paul Gilbert
The foundational popular text on compassion-focused therapy. Worth reading if self-criticism is the loudest voice in the room, which in behavioural addiction work it very often is.
Irresistible
Adam Alter
A clear account of how technology is designed to be difficult to stop using. Reading it tends to shift the question from 'what is wrong with me' to 'what is this product doing'.
Gaming & Internet Addiction Therapy →Atomic Habits
James Clear
Practical and widely read on habit design and environment. Take the optimisation framing lightly — the useful part is the emphasis on friction and cues rather than willpower.
Wintering
Katherine May
Not a psychology book, and better for it. A case for rest and fallow periods as necessary rather than as failure, which is a difficult idea to accept and a useful one to sit with.
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
The book most often recommended to people exploring trauma. Some of its specific claims are debated within the field, and it can be a heavy read early on — worth pacing, and worth discussing in session.
Trauma & PTSD Therapy →For therapists and trainees
Texts that come up regularly in supervision, particularly with practitioners taking on behavioural addiction work for the first time.
ACT Made Simple
Russ Harris
Still the most usable practitioner introduction to ACT. The chapters on workability and values do a great deal of work in compulsive behaviour cases.
Motivational Interviewing
William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick
Essential for addiction work of any kind. The reframing of resistance as something the conversation produces, rather than something the client brings, changes how these sessions go.
Compassion Focused Therapy: Distinctive Features
Paul Gilbert
The concise practitioner entry point to CFT. Directly applicable to the shame that maintains secrecy in gambling, gaming and pornography presentations.
Clinical Supervision →Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
Francine Shapiro
The primary source text. Dense, and no substitute for accredited EMDR training, but the standard reference for the protocol and the adaptive information processing model.
EMDR Therapy →Trauma and Recovery
Judith Herman
The book that established phased trauma treatment as the clinical default. Decades old and still the clearest argument for why stabilisation precedes processing.
The Gift of Therapy
Irvin D. Yalom
Eighty-five short chapters on being in the room with someone. Best read a few pages at a time, ideally when the work feels technical and something has gone missing from it.
This list is reviewed occasionally rather than continuously, so a recently published book may not appear here yet. For shorter, more current writing, the blog is updated far more often, and the resource hub holds free worksheets and guides you can use straight away.