Five Books that have Shaped my Mental Health Leadership Identity

Books give us the gift of language to our own experiences, which serves to support our self-of-therapist development. I truly believe we are never done growing and we are ever-evolving, so it was meaningful to reflect on the books I most identify with as a professor, supervisor, and consultant to therapists and counseling students. As a passionate mental health leader, here are books that have had a profound impact on how I show up with the therapists (and clients) I serve.

Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky (2009). An oldie but a goodie, this book was one I discovered only after I was in professional burnout for two years. I remember wishing someone had introduced this book to me in graduate school. Written compassionately, I felt so seen and hopeful that burnout recovery was possible.

Moving from ALERT to Acceptance: Helping Clinicians Heal from Client Suicide (2024). My own book, this was the hardest one to write out of the 11 (soon to be 12!!) published books out in the world. It was the book I needed in 2021 when my client died by suicide. I continue to lean into the abundant compassion and zero judgement woven throughout the content and although it’s life altering to be a clinician survivor, this work has helped me serve and build communities for other clinician survivors, which has brought another rich layer of meaning and purpose to the work I do.

For the Love of Therapy by Nicole Arzt and Jeremy Arzt (2024). This book celebrates authenticity in the therapeutic relationship which is a cornerstone of what I teach students in their clinical mental health education. A heartfelt, fast read, I love how the authors speak to the inevitability of rupture and the beauty of repair—the very thing students are most afraid of when they start working with their clients. 

The Art of Money by Bari Tessler (2016). Engaging this book in my own money healing prior to becoming a Certified Financial Therapist was crucial prior to engaging other clinicians in the same emotional and vulnerable process. I love how Bari invites folks to slow down and notice what’s going on with their body when it comes to money, and I happily recommend this book to therapists coming into financial therapy work with me as a starting place of curiosity around the money beliefs and behaviors we each hold.

The Resilient Therapist by Ashley Charbonneau and Khara Croswaite Brindle (coming Fall 2026!). Another book I was seeking personally and professionally after several significant career traumas over the last sixteen years, this book is meant to support the healing process for clinicians to find resilience after career-altering events within our field. It is an invitation to feel seen in experiences of client violence, client sudden death, client suicide, professional betrayal, grievance, and subpoena (what we call Adverse Psychological Events) and feel validated for what you carry, alongside discovering the strength to continue forward.

What books have had a significant impact on how you show up in this field? I’d love to know!

Why Did I Write a Book about Mother-Daughter Estrangement?

Understanding Ruptured Mother-Daughter Relationships was inspired by my client work in therapy with women of all different backgrounds, but it was also informed by brief estrangement within my family tree, as well as four generations of estrangement in the family I’m married into. It’s a book that looks at a pattern I was seeing in the women I was serving as a therapist, specifically the energy estrangement was taking up in their lives and the possible stages they could experience as the result of a relationship rupture with their mom. I first wrote about the stages I was seeing—named the Estrangement Energy Cycle—in 2020. We were in the thick of the pandemic, and I think I was holding onto something that made sense at a time where nothing in the greater world made sense. I released a blog on the cycle that colleagues responded favorably to, affirming that they were seeing what I was seeing in their therapeutic work as well. That was when I knew I had a future book to write on the subject.

Fast forward to 2022, I’d self-published three books in three years on subjects that felt important to me and relevant to the populations I was serving. I had just become a mother to my own daughter and was on maternity leave when a request to review a book proposal came through, with an open invitation to pitch book ideas to the publisher. So my entrepreneurial brain said, why not? I was eight weeks postpartum when I submitted my book proposal, and my daughter was four months old when I started researching and writing this book. 

It’s not lost on me that I was writing a book about mother-daughter estrangement while fostering healthy attachment with my own infant daughter. Upon learning about my book deal with a publisher, my mom asked me outright if there was anything I needed to tell her. That conversation still makes me chuckle since I know she was just making sure that things between us were okay and it showed she was interested in this topic too. I’d had a couple tumultuous teenage years with my mom that I reflected upon while writing this book, which only strengthened my gratitude for our close relationship in my adult years as I watch her deep and unconditional love for my baby girl as her first grandchild. My mom had been estranged from her dad for a period of time as a young adult when her parents divorced after his infidelity. I know that my grandma’s devastation about the divorce influenced my mom’s decision to stop speaking to him. My grandma was so hurt and angry that I recall her speaking poorly of my grandfather to my sister and I as early as five years old, encouraging us to call him a derogatory nickname in her household as a sign of allegiance to her. This memory shaped a chapter of the book on the ripple effect on families, where family members feel pressured to declare loyalties to one family member or another as the result of the estrangement. 

Fortunately for my mom, she was able to reconcile with her dad and maintained a healthy, loving relationship with him for the remainder of his life, all while setting boundaries with her mom on how she expressed her hurt and distrust in front of us kids. Boundaries in families were again revisited when watching my in-laws pursue estrangement that resulted in four generations not speaking to one another over the course of several years. Observing the walking-on-eggshells dynamic, the justification for broken ties, and the sadness and hurt that resulted from those estrangements informed multiple chapters of this book, including what community members could say or do to support someone who is estranged. 

As for the writing process of this book, I would read and research estrangement during my daughter’s many naps as an infant, and would write for two hours every night after putting her to bed. Oftentimes the writing came easily, although sometimes I spent my evening reworking a chapter or story to address writer’s block and anchor myself in what content was coming next. A silly memory I have of this time was sitting in my closet on the floor, writing away while trying not to wake the baby, all while remaining several feet away in case she fussed or needed me.

My favorite part of this book was capturing stories of women going through the estrangement energy cycle, inspired by clients I’d served as a therapist for the past decade. Recalling my clients’ hard work was a gift, they had inspired this book’s content from the very beginning and writing about their stories felt like the work had come full circle. Not only was this book capturing the beautiful, vulnerable work clients had done for themselves, it would serve as a beacon of hope for other adult daughters exploring estrangement and reconciliation with their mothers.

Having colleagues to survey and beta reader feedback of the first draft helped flushed out the content even more. My mom has been the first reader and editor of all my books, so her feedback felt very symbolic for this book in particular. It even spurred some additional compassionate conversations about my grandma from the lenses of abuse and trauma, that I felt helped my mom heal from rocky relationship moments in their mother-daughter dynamic too. In writing every night, I finished and submitted my manuscript in four months time! Then came the journey of cover design and awaiting the finished product to put out in the world.

As I reflect on this journey today, I’m feeling so grateful for the process and connections this book has brought into my life as an author, therapist, and mother. Hearing from clinicians and adult daughters as readers of this book has been very fulfilling, and I hope it encourages healing for many readers, including the mothers and daughters within my own family tree.