An articulate, compassionate road map to sexual health after trauma.
Covington and Carlisle offer a specialized self-help guide for those struggling to connect to their sexual selves.
Drawing on their years of experience helping others (Covington is a clinician who has spent decades creating “gender-responsive and trauma-informed programs and services”; Carlisle is a coach and educator in the fields of gender, sexuality, and trauma), the authors have created a self-help guide for sexual trauma survivors, those who are in some form of recovery, or anyone who has lingering questions or fears about sex. The book is divided into four parts, the first of which focuses on “the inner journey” of identifying and sifting through one’s feelings: “Recovery proceeds because of a willingness to become and to remain attentive and receptive to our true selves, which are complex, filled with good, bad, neutral, and confusing parts.” Part 2 looks outward, focusing on establishing healthy relationships with others through steps like setting boundaries. Part 3 explores the work that goes into actively choosing to embrace one’s sexuality after trauma, including learning to stop putting other people’s sexual needs above one’s own. The final section helps readers tackle true intimacy, both with themselves and others. Scattered throughout are numerous anecdotes from real people who have undergone sexual recovery in addition to exercises (such as vulva exploration) that are designed to help readers heal and understand themselves in new ways. The authors’ knowledge and compassion are relayed through a narrative voice that’s both warm and straightforward. While the book necessarily focuses on the physicality of sexuality, the authors delicately balance this material with discussions of essential mental and emotional aspects of the subject. This is a guide that truly focuses on the whole person, delving deeply into everything that could be holding readers back from achieving sexual freedom—from diet culture and rape culture to addiction and childhood trauma. Covington and Carlisle deliver a comprehensive, caring manual that educates while it heals.
An articulate, compassionate road map to sexual health after trauma.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781636340920
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Hazelden
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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