Table of Contents
- 1. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom
- 2. The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom
- 3. The Next Person You Meet in Heaven: The Sequel to The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
- 4. Wally Lamb Books
- 5. Me Before You (Me Before You Trilogy) by JoJo Moyes
- 6. The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People by Judith Orloff
- 7. Thriving as an Empath: 365 Days of Self-Care for Sensitive People by Judith Orloff
- Editor’s note.
All of us experience emotional upheaval from time to time. We might need a therapist, a friend, or a book to help us into a calmer, happy state of mind. The past several months have been a time of emotional stress worldwide.
Emotional wounds began or grew wider during 2020.
Isolation from loved ones and friends, colleagues, teachers, and fellow students made life difficult as each of us wondered how best to prevent illness and death from COVID-19. Anyone who had already been experiencing emotional problems before or because of the onset of COVID-19 found their problems harder to handle if they couldn’t access mental health professionals.
It’s been a complicated time of mental health, medical, and social distancing confusion. No matter the source of the emotional upset, the wider world is reading more books now that we have time to do so.
Many of those books can restore a reader’s emotional health. They do it by lifting your soul and intellect to empowering heights.
Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie tends to bring on emotionally healing tears. The book is about what a young man learned from his lively, then dying, sociology professor.
Those lessons were about setting psyche-saving priorities and how to live life fully despite devastating setbacks. All of that can be achieved by learning about life from death itself. Superbly written and a wonderful topic for conversation or quiet contemplation, Tuesday’s with Morrie is a book that lets you learn important life lessons over and over again with every reading.
Albom’s The TimeKeeper is for people strong enough to consider the implications of being stuck with a situation until you realize its spiritual lessons. Then the problem ends. These excerpts from the book capture its value in helping readers to heal from inner pain:
“Knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.”
“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”
Time is not something you give back. The very next moment may be an answer to your prayer. To deny that is to deny the most important part of the future.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope.”
The Next Person You Meet in Heaven is a marvelous Mitch Albom book for people who need to forgive themselves for regrettable mistakes. The stories describe fictional people doing their best though making serious, sometimes deadly, mistakes of judgment. All of them achieve forgiveness and recover their self-respect.
4. Wally Lamb Books
Wally Lamb books let readers have vicarious experiences, living someone else’s life page by page. The non-fiction stories let you feel someone else’s emotions so that you can sort out your own and heal as necessary.
Me before you by Jojo Moyes is just beautiful. It is a story of a few people working through extremely painful emotions and realizing that, somehow, they are helping each other to reach a state of insight. Several emotional surprises are included in the tale. Read the story and grow with the characters.
Empaths are people who feel the emotions and “hear” others’ thoughts, sometimes with astonishing accuracy. The results can confuse empaths. They wonder if the thoughts and feelings originated within themselves or someone else.
The confusion, let alone the insights, tends to upset empathic people who don’t know how to balance their insightful gifts. Doctor Judith Orloff’s books can be very helpful to empaths. She’s a psychiatrist on the UCLA Psychiatric Clinical Faculty, whose career began with the need to sort out her empathic abilities as a teenager.
Another marvelous resource for empaths will probably be published in 2021. It is a coffee table book of insights and sayings from the Shift Network’s Rabbi Doniel Katz of the Elevation Project.
Here’s an intriguing quote from Katz, “What so many don’t realize is that when you’re dealing with some people’s healing, it’s not just their own,” remarks Rabbi Doniel Katz.
“It is their soul family’s as well. Whether we are aware of it or not, many of our challenges are an extension of previous generations; things that they either didn’t deal with or weren’t able to deal with. A person may carry anxiety and questions that are not just their own, but that have accumulated over generations.”
Editor’s note.
10 other helpful books on emotional healing:
- Emotional Healing for Dummies by Helen Whitten
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
- Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
- Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw
- Five Simple Steps to Emotional Healing: The Last Self-Help Book You Will Ever Need by Gloria Arenson
- The Emotion Code by Bradley Nelson
- Recovery of Your Inner Child by Lucia Capacchione
- The Art of Emotional Healing by Lucia Capacchione
- Rising Strong by Brené Brown
- The Astonishing Power of Emotions: Let Your Feelings be Your Guide by Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks
