What are your other paradigm-shifting books, other than The Explosive Child? What's the title of the book you mentioned about kids falling through the cracks of the educational system?
The school one is Lost At School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them, also by Ross W. Greene, PhD. (What's funny is I plucked this right off the shelf like it belonged to me all YASSSSS before realizing it was by the same guy.)
My paradigm shifters... hmm. Trying to figure out where I should draw the line, because I have a handful that are ones I've encountered during my legal career but some I hit before that. Some of these have become a lot more popular and a lot more commonly understood since then, so they aren't as cosmic.
Well, okay, I'll start with those.
The Body Keeps the Score: paradigm shift to understanding that parts of emotion are just physical, and must be processed physically. That the physical can and will overwhelm the intellectual and sometimes there isn't a damn thing your brain can do about it until you can put your trauma narrative together. That connecting you with your body is the scariest but most effective part of trauma treatment.
Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft: this is the real beginning to understanding what happens in genuine abuse. Followed by --
How He Gets Into Her Head by Don Hennessey. This was the beginning of me articulating the difference between the really manipulative offenders and the disorganized, often drug-addictd, unstable, and violent relationships where violence landed people in the court system. You can feel the difference when you're interacting with these, but it's so, so hard to fully articulate. And obviously it's not a binary, relationships can rocket back and forth on a spectrum of control and power.
My understanding of white power over Black & brown folks was something I mostly didn't gain from books, but I gotta drop in this:
The Color of Law: you see people talk about how systemic barriers are like different bars of a cage and being able to see just one is like. well just go around it? But nothing gave me a better picture of the many bars and how they came to be than this. Important to note though that I literally didn't even finish it, so I'm not sure how legit it is to count it here.
Regarding the War on Drugs:
Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari. This book tells you the full and complete history behind the war on drugs. And, holy fuck. The number of shocks I got while reading this even after like 8-9 years in the criminal justice system was pretty wild. Learning the absolute depth and breadth of violence and harm that the war on drugs -- not the drugs! the war! -- is responsible for is a lot of gut punches, over and over.
The Explosive Child by Ross Greene, PhD. Ross Greene says: children want to be good. Children are good if they can be. He shows a whole new way to think about child behavior problems, and he's fucking right.
The Explosive Child sent me a little further down the road towards thinking about problem-solving instead of punishment -- which is really what I was already doing on a daily basis, but it helped me start to sharpen and clarify why I was so against punishment.
The Secret History of Kindness: Learning from How Dogs Learn by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. I think this book is a little too overly intellectual at times, but it is a book that talks about learning, and reward, and reinforcement, negative and positive. And philosophy and humanity and animals and all kinds of things. I put it here because of one incredibly important insight: punishment is positively reinforcing to the punisher. She says: it feels good to punish, it releases anger and tension, it solves the problem in the short term, and because it feels good, it becomes a reinforcing behavior.
And down to my most recent revelations:
No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. This is what I'm drawing on when I talk about communicating with yourself and learning from the lessons your emotions have to offer about you. It's the foundational book for the therapeutic modality Internal Family Systems, and it teaches you that there is a way forward that does not involve punishment and exclusion of parts of your self.
Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. This. This book. This book is about a way of speaking about yourself and your emotions that identifies causation without fault and takes responsibility for your own reactions. It teaches how to speak specifically about problems so that you can move to specificity about solutions. Above all, it is kind, forgiving, and open to hearing what others say.
and I haven't finished it yet, but Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman is going to be one of them. I'm a few chapters in and it's just hitting banger after banger. What a complicated, fraught topic! What a complex, nuanced, and kind way of looking at it!
I may be missing some, but I think that's the set that's really work-relevant and non-fiction. I hope this adds some interesting to-reads!
