Recommended Reading

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

by Jonice Webb

Running on Empty is the first self-help book about Emotional Neglect: an invisible force from your childhood which you can't see, but may be affecting you profoundly to this day. It is about what didn't happen in your childhood, what wasn't said, and what cannot be remembered.

Do you sometimes feel as if you're just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you're fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? Perhaps you have a fine life and are good at your work, but somehow it's just not enough to make you happy.

If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. Who blame themselves for not being happier.

If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don't feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. Perhaps when you do experience strong emotions, you have difficulty understanding or tolerating them. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good.

Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.

Emotionally Health Discipleship

by Pete Scazzero

The global church is facing a discipleship crisis. Here is how we move forward.

Pastors and church leaders want to see lives changed by the gospel. They work tirelessly to care for people, initiate new ministries, preach creatively, and keep up with trends. Sadly, much of this effort does not result in deeply changed disciples.

Traditional discipleship strategies fail because they do not:

• Slow down people's lives so they can cultivate a deep, personal relationship with Jesus.

• Challenge the values of Western culture that have compromised the radical call to follow the crucified Jesus.

• Integrate sadness, loss, and vulnerability, leaving people defensive and easily triggered.

• Measure our spiritual maturity by how we are growing in our ability to love others.

In Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, bestselling author Pete Scazzero lays out how to create an emotionally healthy culture and multiply deeply-changed people in every aspect of church life—including leadership and team development, marriage and single ministry, small groups, preaching, worship, youth and children's ministry, administration, and outreach.

Complete with assessments and practical strategies, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship will help you move people to the beneath-the-surface discipleship that actually has the power to change the world.

The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages

What separates happy marriages from miserable ones?

Surprisingly, it’s not healthy communication. It’s not conflict resolution skills. It’s actually the size of the marriage’s joy gap . 

Joy Gap/joi gap/ (n.)-1. The length of time between moments of shared joy 

When the joy gap gets bigger, problems are more likely to overwhelm you, resentment creeps in, and you start to feel distant and alone in your marriage. When the joy gap is smaller, you regularly feel connected and happy, problems feel manageable, and your marriage becomes a reliable source of joy. But how do you ensure that you’re experiencing joy regularly?

Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey have studied relationships (and neuroscience) and discovered four habits that keep joy regular and problems small. Some couples do them naturally, but anyone can learn. That’s why each chapter includes 15-minute exercises that boost joy and re-train your brain to make joy your default setting. You’ll learn new skills including how to: 

• return to joy more quickly after disconnection

• create stronger bonds and elongate times of happiness

• boost your enjoyment of physical and emotional intimacy

Find out what your marriage looks like after a little work and a whole lot of joy.

Try Softer

by Aundi Kolber, LPCC

In a world that preaches a “try harder” gospel―just keep going, keep hustling, keep pretending we’re all fine―we’re left exhausted, overwhelmed, and so numb to our lives. If we’re honest, we’ve been overfunctioning for so long, we can’t even imagine another way. How else will things get done? How else will we survive?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Aundi Kolber believes that we don’t have to white-knuckle our way through life. In her debut book, Try Softer, she’ll show us how God specifically designed our bodies and minds to work together to process our stories and work through obstacles. Through the latest psychology, practical clinical exercises, and her own personal story, Aundi equips and empowers us to connect us to our truest self and truly live. This is the “try softer” life.

In Try Softer, you’ll learn how to:

• Know and set emotional and relational boundaries

• Make sense of the difficult experiences you’ve had

• Identify your attachment style―and how that affects your relationships today

• Move through emotions rather than get stuck by them

• Grow in self-compassion and talk back to your inner critic

Trying softer is sacred work. And while it won’t be perfect or easy, it will be worth it. Because this is what we were made for: a living, breathing, moving, feeling, connected, beautifully incarnational life.