Recommended Reading List

At Holistically Divine Counseling (HDC), we believe in the transformative power of knowledge and self-discovery.

This curated selection of books reflects our commitment to supporting you on your journey toward personal growth, healing, and overall well-being. Whether you’re seeking practical techniques to navigate life’s challenges, a deeper understanding of psychological principles, or inspirational stories of resilience, this collection offers diverse resources to meet your needs. Each book has been chosen with care, aiming to provide you with insights, comfort, and the tools necessary to embark on a path of self-improvement and emotional empowerment. We may earn a commission when you purchase a book using the links below.

1-18 of 49 books
  • Emotional Self-Care for Black Women: Discover How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, Eliminate Negative Thinking and Heal from Past Traumas Even if Your Life is Chaotic Right Now
    • Healing & Trauma
    Emotional Self-Care for Black Women: Discover How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, Eliminate Negative Thinking and Heal from Past Traumas Even if Your Life is Chaotic Right Now

    By: Alicia Magoro

    Have you been feeling like you can never get a break? Are your days full of conflict and challenges that you constantly have to fight and overcome? Are you tired of riding the rollercoaster of anger, fear, frustration, and overwhelm and wish you could just take a step back from your problems? Being a black woman today comes with unique struggles that others don’t even know about. You face the discrimination that both women and people of color encounter. Your needs are often belittled or dismissed. You have to battle against a lot of unhelpful labels and limitations imposed on you by society.

  • The Art Of Saying NO: How To Stand Your Ground, Reclaim Your Time And Energy, And Refuse To Be Taken For Granted (Without Feeling Guilty!)
    • Boundaries
    The Art Of Saying NO: How To Stand Your Ground, Reclaim Your Time And Energy, And Refuse To Be Taken For Granted (Without Feeling Guilty!)

    By: Damon Zahariades

    Damon Zahariades provides a step-by-step, strategic guide for setting boundaries and developing the assertiveness you need to maintain them. You’ll learn how to say no in every situation, at home and in the workplace, according to your convictions. And best of all, you’ll discover how to get your friends, family members, bosses, coworkers, and neighbors to respect your boundaries and recognize your personal authority.

  • The Forgiveness Workbook: Cultivate Compassion, Release Resentment, and Find Peace
    • Boundaries
    The Forgiveness Workbook: Cultivate Compassion, Release Resentment, and Find Peace

    By: Ilene S. Cohen PhD

    Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or returning to the way things were before: it means choosing to release resentment and live a freer, happier life. For anyone seeking a starting point on the path to forgiving themselves or someone else, The Forgiveness Workbook can light the way.

  • Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind
    • Anxiety & Depression
    Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

    By: Judson Brewer

    Distilling more than 20 years of research and hands-on work with thousands of patients, including Olympic athletes and coaches, and leaders in government and business, Dr. Brewer has created a clear, solution-oriented program that anyone can use to feel better – no matter how anxious they feel.

  • The Awakened Family: How to Raise Empowered, Resilient, and Conscious Children
    • Parenting & Family
    The Awakened Family: How to Raise Empowered, Resilient, and Conscious Children

    By: Shefali Tsabary Ph.D.

    We all have the capacity to raise children who are highly resilient and emotionally connected. However, many of us are unable to because we are blinded by modern misconceptions of parenting and our own inner limitations. In The Awakened Family, I show you how you can cultivate a relationship with your children so they can thrive; moreover, you can be transformed to a state of greater calm, compassion and wisdom as well.

  • Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
    • Boundaries
    Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself

    By: Nedra Glover Tawwab

    Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them–in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do “healthy boundaries” really mean–and how can we successfully express our needs, say “no,” and be assertive without offending others?

  • The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing
    • Healing & Trauma
    The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

    By: Anneliese A. Singh PhD LPC

    The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You’ll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you’ll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.

  • Boundaries in Dating: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Relationships
    • Boundaries
    Boundaries in Dating: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Relationships

    By: Henry Cloud, John Townsend

    Boundaries in Dating provides a way to think, solve problems, and enjoy the benefits of dating in the fullest way, including increasing the ability to find and commit to a marriage partner.

  • Calm Your Thoughts: Stop Overthinking, Stop Stressing, Stop Spiraling, and Start Living
    • Anxiety & Depression
    Calm Your Thoughts: Stop Overthinking, Stop Stressing, Stop Spiraling, and Start Living (The Path to Calm)

    By: Nick Trenton

    Calm Your Thoughts is a book that understands where you’ve been through,the exhausting situation you’ve put yourself into, and how you lose your mind in the trap of anxiety and stress. Acclaimed author Nick Trenton will walk you through the obstacles with detailed and proven techniques to help you rewire your brain, control your thoughts, and change your mental habits.

  • The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
    • Boundaries
    The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

    By: Don Miguel Ruiz

    In The Four Agreements, bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

  • Safe People: How to Find Relationships that are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't
    • Boundaries
    Safe People: How to Find Relationships that are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren’t

    By: Henry Cloud, John Townsend

    Safe People will help you discover why good people can get tangled in bad relationships, how to avoid repeating your own mistakes, and how to pick safe, healthy people for the friends you make and the company you keep.

  • It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
    • Healing & Trauma
    It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

    By: Mark Wolynn

    It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.

  • Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids
    • Parenting & Family
    Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids

    By: Hunter Clarke-Fields MSAE, Carla Naumburg PhD

    With this book, you’ll find powerful mindfulness skills for calming your own stress response when difficult emotions arise. You’ll also discover strategies for cultivating respectful communication, effective conflict resolution, and reflective listening. In the process, you’ll learn to examine your own unhelpful patterns and ingrained reactions that reflect the generational habits shaped by your parents, so you can break the cycle and respond to your children in more skillful ways.

  • The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
    • Parenting & Family
    The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

    By: Daniel J. J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson

    In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain.

    • Boundaries
    Boundaries Workbook: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life

    By: Henry Cloud, John Townsend

    This companion guide to Boundaries by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend provides practical readings and prompts that will encourage you and teach you how to set healthy, necessary boundaries with your parents, spouse, children, friends, bosses, coworkers, social media, and more in order to help you become the best version of yourself.

  • Boundaries in Marriage: Understanding the Choices That Make or Break Loving Relationships
    • Boundaries
    Boundaries in Marriage: Understanding the Choices That Make or Break Loving Relationships

    By: Henry Cloud, John Townsend

    In Boundaries in Marriage, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, counselors and authors of the New York Times bestseller Boundaries, teach us that healthy boundaries are the property lines that define and protect you and your spouse as individuals. Once you have them in place, a good marriage can become better, and a less-than-satisfying one can even be saved.

  • No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
    • Healing & Trauma
    No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

    By: Richard Schwartz Ph.D., Alanis Morissette

    Is there just one “you”? We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be. Yet Dr. Richard Schwartz’s research now challenges this “mono-mind” theory. “All of us are born with many sub-minds―or parts,” says Dr. Schwartz. “These parts are not imaginary or symbolic. They are individuals who exist as an internal family within us―and the key to health and happiness is to honor, understand, and love every part.”

  • The Sugar Jar: Create Boundaries, Embrace Self-Healing, and Enjoy the Sweet Things in Life
    • Boundaries
    The Sugar Jar: Create Boundaries, Embrace Self-Healing, and Enjoy the Sweet Things in Life

    By: Yasmine Cheyenne

    Imagine a glass jar filled with sugar on a kitchen counter. You are the jar, and the sugar is your energy. If the jar has no lid, people can come in and take as much sugar as they want. Sometimes, they spill that sugar all over. You may try to refill your jar—replenish your energy—through self-care, but because there is no a lid—no protective boundary—you cannot control how much of your vital life force is being drained.