Resources — Evolving With eMMe

I have spent much of my life researching…. life.

As a child, I loved the library. Writing research papers was like mapping uncharted territory. Learning about places, people, beliefs, culture, and history and using my own beliefs, culture, and experiences to understand the world a little bit more than before I started. I feel the same way about intentionally evolving—understanding myself and the world a little bit more than I did before I wondered why my life wasn’t filled with more zoomies and joy.

That question and a shocking “Bring it on Universe” shout-out had me dragging out the search engines whenever wondering took me to places I had never been. I invite you to do the same with the list of books and individuals I ransacked for information.

This collection of books, people, therapies, and ideas (some with accessible links), will change as my map to the unknowable future meanders ahead.

May the research lead you closer to YOU than when you started…

eMMe

My 2024 Bookshelf:

In no particular order—therapeutic explorations that includes academia, poetry, & children’s books.

The Ethics of Caring; Kylea Taylor, 1995-2017
The Velveteen Rabbit; Margery Williams, 1922
The Haunted Self; O. Hart, E. Nijenhauis, and K. Steele, 2006
Black Liturgies; Cole Arthur Riley, 2024
Journey through Trauma; Gretchen Schmelzer, 2018
your wound / my garden; ALOK V. Menon, 2021
A Stone is a Story; Leslie Booth, 2023
Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame; P. DeYoung, 2015
Emotional Inheritance; Galit Atlas, 2022
Lincoln in the Bardo; George Saunders, 2017
The Wisdom of Your Body; Hillary McBride, 2021
Soil; Camille T. Dungy, 2023
The Unwinding; Jackie Morris, 2020

therapies:

EMDR—Eye Movement, Desensitization, and Reprocessing is a psychotherapy treatment that is designed to alleviate the stress associated with traumatic memories…

IFS—Internal Family System Therapy is a transformative tool that conceives every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self…

People & Pods With Ideas:

Thomas Hübl:

“Unresolved past is a destiny; it repeats until we have the courage to work together to face it…”

We Can do Hard Things Podcast:

“Life is freaking hard. We are all doing hard things every single day – things like loving and losing; caring for children and parents; forging and ending friendships; battling addiction, illness, and loneliness; struggling in our jobs, our marriages,...”

Andrea Gibson, poet laureate:

“I traced my finger through the valleys of her laugh lines, and felt a peace unlike anything I’d ever experienced. A peace that seemed wildly incongruent with the news we’d just received. A peace that made no sense to me, until I found its source.”

ALOK V. Menon, poet:

“just a reminder that you are worth more than the summation of your trauma. that you have an essential value and dignity simply and irrevocably because you exist. that even though almost every institution and hand and word has been forged precisely for the purpose of teaching insignificance, you are significant. and i may not have the language for it right now but both the impossibility of your resilience and the deep and profound respect i feel for you (let’s call it love for the sake of coherence) suggest that there is something operating at a level that we have not been taught to register (or perhaps have been schooled to forget).”