Psychology

Review: Love Your Neighbor

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Cover image of "Love Your Neighbor" by Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen

Love Your Neighbor

Love Your Neighbor, Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen, foreword by Dominique DuBois Gilliard. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802885234) 2026.

Summary: The psychological pathways and spiritual practices informed by scripture that activate neighbor love.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:30-31, NIV)

Two simple commands that sum up the life of a Christian disciple. Clear. But challenging enough to engage us for a lifetime in keeping them. This book focuses on the second of these, how we love the real neighbors in our lives. It addresses the gap between our aspirations and the reality of our practice. Written by a social psychologist and a practical theologian, it brings together both psychological and biblical insights that help us turn aspirations into action, potential into practice.

The book is broken into three parts. The first explores the circumstances that get in the way of loving neighbors. Some of this is knowing who our neighbors are, which I appreciated. I recently realized I don’t even know the names of many of our nearby neighbors. Then we are often in too much of a hurry, not unlike the two religious leaders with the man by the side of the road. Likewise, we may be on overload from both physical activity and mental distractions like our devices. So, we may need some silence and stillness in our lives. Finally, when there are many others who could love, we fall prey to “the bystander effect” instead of taking personal responsibility when we see a need.

But sometimes what we think and feel about our neighbors gets in the way of loving them. The second part addresses this challenge. Firstly, practicing giving the benefit of the doubt helps us deal with negative first impressions. Often, we pigeonhole and dehumanize people. So, personal encounters help us discover the full humanity of others. But sometimes our dehumanizing leads to contempt. This chapter reminded me of the young man in our neighborhood whose loud exhaust and fast driving disturbs me day and night. At the authors’ suggestion, I’ve begun praying for him each time I hear his car. It helps!

Then sometimes our sense of scarcity keeps us from loving. We start seeing life as a zero sum game, where whatever I give is loss for me and gain for another. Instead, we are invited to learn to trust God’s care for us and that there will be enough to go around. Finally, our unquestioned beliefs may get in the ways of helping others in the form of confirmation bias. The authors challenge us to question and explore and think about our unquestioned beliefs about others.

The third section gets into ways we may choose to love better. In a mobile society, they encourage us to treat every place we live as home, a place where we invest. They invite us to grow in listening with empathy, as well as talking less in order to listen. Then, there are many times where simply being present, especially to someone in pain is the most loving thing we can do. Finally, despite our efforts, people may still treat us poorly. Rather than retaliate, the authors explore how we might keep showing up, sustained by prayer and affirmations of our worth.

Each chapter consists of three parts including insights from psychology, theological insights that parallel these, and very practical strategies for living these out faithfully. What I appreciated is that the parallel insights do not seem forced, as has been the case at times when writers try combine psychology and scripture. And they offer very practical strategies.

Our church, a neighborhood church, has been learning to know and love our neighbors, beginning with knowing them by name. I’m going to suggest that our governance team get the book and read it to think about going deeper into neighbor love. I’d recommend it for other leaders groups as well. And any individual or group may profit from reading and practicing what’s here. After all, it just takes us into deeper obedience to the command of Jesus to love our neighbors.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Hard Feelings

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Cover image of "Hard Feelings" by Daniel Smith.

Hard Feelings

Hard Feelings, Daniel Smith. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781982103903) 2026.

Summary: We are inclined to suppress negative emotions but if we listen to what they are saying about ourselves, we gain wisdom.

Daniel Smith received two unusual gifts for his fortieth birthday. One was a 1621 book, The Anatomy of Melancholy. The other was a coffee table book of the strange, lurid art of Hieronymus Bosch. He shelved the books away but couldn’t forget them. He’d wrestled with what one might call “negative emotions” all his life, and most dramatically after his divorce several years earlier, that sent him in a tailspin. But he couldn’t shelve the negative emotions these represented. Neither could he wallow in them. As a therapist, he was coming to understand that the place to begin was to be curious about them and what they were pointing to, perhaps in his own life.

Before he gets into specific emotions he first explores the morality of emotions and theories about emotions. All to often, emotions were divided into good and bad, with the bad being immoral. Then he explores theories of emotions, considering both Basic Emotion Theory and the Theory of Constructed Emotion. The former proposes that we are wired to respond in certain ways to different experiences, the latter, that how we respond is shaped by our interpretation of experience. Smith favors the latter and believes we need to “understand the complex structures and patterns” that underlie our emotions.

In the remainder of the book, in two parts, he considers six emotions we might consider negative. Part Two considers annoyance, shame, and envy. Then Part Three looks at boredom, regret and despair. Smith combines autobiographical material with research to tease out what each of these emotions. Annoyance points to boundaries transgressed that could lead to anger. Smith realized the choice he faces to internalize the annoying–to become annoyed–and that he may choose not to. He discovers that shame feeds on hiding and is lessened with self-exposure. Then there is envy, which may point to a neglected desire, fueled by comparisons with others. Interestingly, he spends a lot of time discussing his wife’s struggle to not have others envy her!

One of the strengths of the book is Smith’s candor. For example he honestly describes his own boredom in parenting a young child. Yet he sees boredom as the underside of a life “pregnant with meaning.” Then, he explores the addictive element of regret that poisons our steps into the future. Finally, despair is the curving inward in which one luxuriates in one’s helplessness rather than accept help, to look beyond oneself. In the author’s case, this meant daily studying a linden in a nearby park.

Perhaps the greatest wisdom here is to acknowledge and listen to all our emotions for what they are trying to show us. Smith’s self-deprecating autobiography models that posture. However, at points, this felt meandering. I didn’t always feel that his discussions “landed.” But perhaps that is also the point. He and all of us are in a process of making sense out of our lives, one that doesn’t progress in neat, linear fashion. He is not one of those who has arrived. Rather, he is still on the way, a way he has illuminated with humor, honesty, and substance.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score

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Cover image of "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. Penguin Books (ISBN: 9780143127741) 2015.

Summary: An account of the growing understanding of the effects of trauma on the brain and the body and promising treatments.

Since its initial publication in 2014, The Body Keeps the Score has prompted a widespread conversation about the effects of trauma on the brain and body. Particularly, in recent years the focus on #MeToo and on race-based trauma have extended the conversation.

For Bessel van der Kolk, his awareness of trauma began with some of the Vietnam war veterans he was seeing. They suffered from nightmares, waking flashbacks, hair-trigger anger responses, alcoholism, depression and suicidal ideation. They also often felt detached from their lives. This book traces the growing understanding of the effects of trauma that didn’t fit existing clinical diagnoses or treatments. Often, efforts to treat symptoms brought little relief.

This book chronicles the learning journey of van der Kolk and other clinicians to understand trauma. A key to all of this was the growing field of neuroscience. They found that the brains of the traumatized were not like others. Either they were in an amygdala-triggered hyper-vigilant state that bypassed the pre-frontal cortex, or they were shut down. Not only this, effects of trauma were also evident in the body from auto-immune issues, headaches, and a number of other somatic complaints. They discovered genes that turned on under stress. Hence the book’s title: the body does keep score.

While his work began with soldiers, van der Kolk began to realize the ongoing marks on mind and body of childhood traumas. These include physical and sexual as well as emotionally abusive situations. They learned to take trauma histories. But they also learned that people were not always consciously aware, or could only remember bits and pieces. And these memories were not integrated parts of one’s life story.

The final part of the book describes a variety of therapeutic approaches. In one sense, trauma cannot be undone. But people can learn to manage the feelings, the triggers that bring up the past. They can learn to be present to others. And they can stop keeping secrets from the self. The author describes the use of neurofeedback, mindfulness, and cognitive behavioral therapy. He devotes a chapter to finding the language to name one’s experience. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is another approach he describes in processing trauma. Because mind and body often detach in trauma, he also addresses approaches like yoga, theater, choral singing and others that re-establish that connection, often in the context of community.

The book combines explanation of neuroscience and physiology with case studies. Another aspect of the book is how the author describes his own learning journey. He considers patients his first teachers. But he also learns from other clinical approaches and allows himself to be the subject of those approaches, sharing how he changes through them. While not ruling out using medications, he prefers other approaches. This makes sense if the goal is for a person to be able to integrate traumatic memories, self-manage, and be present.

Two things I wonder about. One is the “grabbag” of therapeutic approaches. It seems important over time to develop standards of care, identifying the most effective therapies where possible. It also seems like we are in a pendulum swing from not recognizing trauma to possibly applying the label overly freely. I hear people describing listening to the news as traumatizing. Distressing, yes. But traumatizing? It doesn’t seem to be the same thing as childhood sexual abuse or rape. I wonder if clinicians will develop greater precision in what is labelled as and treated as trauma.

Still, I found this a fascinating book and can understand its path-breaking nature. Van der Kolk describes his own journey to understanding trauma’s effects on brain and body when there wasn’t a category for this. And he offers hope that, while we can’t undo trauma, what we’ve learned about neuroscience and therapy can help people get their lives back and understand and not just react to trauma. There is hope.

Review: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. New York: Touchstone, 2006 (originally published in 1985).

Summary: Brief case histories of twenty-four patients with unusual neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks is one of those authors I discovered in recent years, beginning to read him only shortly before his death in 2015. Only now have I gotten around to what is probably his most famous work. It is organized in four sections: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Each section is introduced by a clinical discussion followed by four to nine illustrative case histories.

The title essay is found in the first section on losses, or cognitive deficits due to disease or damage to a particular brain structure. In the case of Dr. P, a musician and teacher, while the cause remained undetermined, he could not identify the objects he was seeing. He could describe them in detail, but he did not know what he was seeing. Hence at one point, when getting dressed to go out, he grabbed the top of his wife’s head, thinking it a hat. His visual agnosia left his musical abilities untouched, and with accommodations was able to continue in this work. One of the other cases described in this section was of a woman who lost all sense of her body, a loss of what is called proprioception. She could not tell where her arms or legs were apart from seeing them and had to learn to function by sight rather than by this sense of ourselves we take for granted. Sacks also describes cases of phantom limbs, pain, of someone who could see only the right half of their world, and a man who could not remember his life after 1945.

The section on excesses covered cognitive functions that might be describe as being in hyper mode. He covers things like Tourette’s syndrome, and a fascinating instance of “Cupid’s Disease,” a case of late onset in a patient nearly 90 of symptoms from syphilis contracted when she worked in a brothel as a young woman. It made her “frisky,” symptoms which for her were actually somewhat welcome! Although treated for syphilis, the symptoms remained.

“Transports” covers instances of sensations, memories, or visions that come due to epilepsy, or sometimes drugs, as was the case of a student who suddenly had a heightened sense of smell for a three week period before reverting to normal. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Hildegard of Bingen, whose migraines were accompanied by visions rendered in drawings.

The final section, discussing subjects with profound mental deficits were some of the most touching as Sacks recognizes what they possessed rather than what they lacked, such as Rebecca, who blossomed in a theatre program despite an IQ of 60, or twins who spoke to each other in prime numbers and could almost instantaneously calculate the day on which any calendar date would fall for 80,000 years. The last case of an autistic patient, Jose, shows how much things have advanced since Sacks wrote. He was considered mentally deficient but Sacks discovered an artistic ability that brought him to life. When he was moved to a quieter setting and allowed to develop his artistic expression, he flourished. Perhaps Sacks anticipated (and maybe helped) the advances in the treatment of those on the autism spectrum.

Sacks account is fascinating for its account of unusual neurological conditions, revealing the influences of neurophysiology on our personalities. What is also impressive is the delightful respect Sacks has for his patients. He listens to them and recommends treatments and accommodations that respect their individuality. At the same time, this book strikes me as a “snapshot in time” that reflects the state of knowledge in the 1980’s, which has advanced tremendously since then. What hasn’t changed is the care for the person Sacks shows. They are not just cases to him but people, and hopefully we will never advance beyond respecting the dignity of each person in the way Sacks does.

Review: Bittersweet

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Bittersweet, Susan Cain. New York: Crown, 2022.

Summary: Describes the state of bittersweetness, where sadness and joy, death and life, failure and growth, longing and love intersect and how this deepens our lives and has the power to draw us together.

About ten years ago, Susan Cain published Quiet, helping the extroverted world discover the power of introverts and what they bring us all. In this work, Cain explores why at least some of us like sad songs, rainy days, and react intensely to art?

She helps us enter into understanding bittersweet by telling the story of the cellist of Sarajevo, who during the worst of the shelling, appeared every day and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. It is a beautiful, sad, and evocative piece that capture both the beauty of pre-war Sarajevo and the terrible loss of the war. This is bittersweet, this embrace of sadness and the longing for beauty, for something beyond our fractured existence. Holding together these seemingly disparate experiences, Cain believes is the pathway to “creativity, transcendence, and love.” Bittersweet can draw us together in the shared experience of longing for the transcendent.

Cain explores the sources of our longings for the good, the true, and the beautiful, the wonder of those moments and yet their transience. She contends that it is the place of creativity. She talks about how we live with bittersweet in a world of relentless positivity whose mantra seems to be, “be happy.” She offers an insight into the mental health crisis on university campuses, where everyone has to project a put-together, perfect Instagram image of effortless perfection that no one can live up to. She contends that our understanding of bittersweet can transform workplaces, where we understand the other side of fantastic success is the risk of failure, where allowing workers to acknowledge their struggles releases them to work more freely and productively, knowing that we’re all strugglers here.

The material of the third part on mortality, impermanence, and grief was the most thought-provoking for me. It is framed with the death of her brother and father from COVID-19 and the descent of her mother into dementia, a mother with whom she has had a bittersweet relationship. In between, she narrates attending RAADfest, a gathering of people into radical life extension, who are in revolt against aging and death. While Cain, like all of us would like to live longer, she doesn’t believe the pursuit of deathlessness will lead to peace and harmony, but rather the acceptance of mortality and walking together in it has the power to draw us together. She believes that the embrace of bittersweet is the way out of inherited trauma, when we face and embrace the pain in the lives of our forebears and live with gratitude for their resilience and the gifts they passed on to us.

I found myself reacting in several ways to this book. One was that I recognized a strength Susan Cain has is to name what is often an inchoate sense many of us have. While her “quiz” at the beginning of the book suggests some score higher on the bittersweet scale than others, anyone who has lived enough life, or even through a pandemic grasps this tension of sorrow and wonder, of longing and hope within which we live. Cain’s genius is to name it and give the lie to the American (and often Christian) focus on being happy.

Cain develops her ideas through a series of stories of travels around the world and interviews with a number of insightful people. She is a storyteller, and sometimes, it is hard to keep track of the larger story she is rendering for all the stories. Only in going back over the book for this review did I get any sense of the development of her ideas. With that, I also found the book somewhat repetitive as she makes again and again the point that bittersweet gives meaning, and creativity, love and union with others to our existence. It felt to some degree that this is the world she wanted to be so.

Cain describes herself as moving from an agnosticism to something different, not exactly faith or belief in a particular conception of God. Yet it seems in the end, in an attempt to identify with universal human experience, all she can do is believe in the longing for something more. She quotes C. S. Lewis from Surprised by Joy, noting that “we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an ‘inconsolable longing’ that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one” (pp. 53-54). Yet Lewis found the fulfillment of his longing not in longing but in God. I fear Cain’s argument is to embrace the hunger and the thirst, but not go on to where there is food and drink. I sense she believes that longing or bittersweet is its own satisfaction. I can’t help but wonder if there is a dark side to bittersweet not discussed here, the disillusionment and despair of a life of longing without finding. I found myself praying that she would find, and have the courage to accept, the “other” that she longs for.

Review: Originals

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originals

Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World, Adam Grant (foreword by Sheryl Sandberg). New York: Viking, 2016.

Summary: A study of the characteristics and practices of those who make original contributions in personal and professional life.

Why did Seinfeld barely escape the cutting room floor to become the most successful comedy ever? Why might enemies make better coalition partners than friends? If you have a truly innovative idea, you should drop everything and risk it all–right? Are there times when procrastinating pays off?

Adam Grant explores all these questions and more in Originals. The subtitle of the work gives away a key thread that runs through the book. Those who come up with powerful new ideas and innovations are marked by a basic non-conformity. You might even by able to determine that by what browser they use on their computer. Those who use browsers like Chrome or Firefox might well be “originals” because they do not choose the default browser. They are people who are not content to choose defaults, and often may be either at the bottom or top of an organization, not in the comfortable middle. They are also savvy in managing their “risk portfolio.” They may start a new company (like Google) while keeping their day jobs.

Grant suggests that often, the “originals” succeed in what seem to be counter-intuitive ways. People may innovate in an area where they do not have much previous experience because of taking a fresh look at the problems. People who pursue hobbies in the arts often bring unique perspectives to how they look at a problem. The guy who saved Seinfeld didn’t work in comedy. Sometimes the best way to sell an idea is to show people what is wrong with it, turning them into defenders. Originals learn that you either need to speak up or leave to succeed. Hanging in there or becoming indifferent will never cut it. Sometimes the early bird doesn’t get the worm. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream speech” is a classic example, written the night before in the mood of the moment, and improvised when Mahalia Jackson urged King to tell them about the dream.

Grant also explores why ideas fail. Everyone from Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs thought Dean Kamen had a great idea with his Segway. Kamen was a technical wiz who had developed innovative medical devices from a portable dialysis machine to a drug infusion pump. Yet his Segway was a flop and illustrates some important lessons. One is that creators are not always good at judging their own ideas, and in Kamen’s case, he listened to people who didn’t know any more about transportation than he did. He also illustrates the “kissing frogs” principle. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find Prince Charming! Not all risks succeed, in fact most don’t.

Finally, Grant explores how families and organizations might cultivate the non-conformity that leads to original contributions. An interesting statistic is that one thing most of the great base-stealers have in common is that they are laterborns. Often laterborns compete by finding a different niche in which to succeed than the firstborn. Parents tend to be less strict with laterborns, and emphasizes the importance of parents giving children freedom to be originals–focusing less on rules than moral values–praising them for good behavior more than disciplining bad behavior. Also, focusing on the significance of actions for others, rather than just for oneself enhanced things like hand-washing in patient care. Likewise, good organizations to entrance, rather than exit interviews, getting the fresh perspective of new hires. They foster atmosphere where saying hard things needed to improve performance to bosses is rewarded rather than punished. They learn how to foster a sense of urgency.

Grant illustrates his ideas from a variety of domains from sports to politics to engineering and entertainment. The book is valuable to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial, and all those who want to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit–parents, teachers, company leaders, coaches and mentors. Grant sums it all up in an “Actions for Impact” section with actions we can all take, how we can learn to champion our ideas, how we can spark original ideas in organizations, foster cultures of originality and what parents can do. Grant’s book suggests that we are all “originals.” and that it is not beyond any of us to be people who make original contributions in our part of the world.