Pain Is Really Strange

Answering questions such as 'how can I change my pain experience?', 'what is pain?', and 'how do nerves work?', this short research-based graphic book reveals just how strange pain is and explains how understanding it is often the key to relieving its effects. Studies show that understanding how pain is created and maintained by the nervous system can significantly lessen the pain you experience. The narrator in this original, gently humorous book explains pain in an easy-to-understand, engaging graphic format and reveals how to change the mind's habits to transform pain.

What is the difference between fear and excitement and how can you tell them apart? How do the mind and body make emotions? When can anxiety be good? This science-based graphic book addresses these questions and more, revealing just how strange anxiety is, but also how to unravel its mysteries and relieve its effects. Understanding how anxiety is created by our nervous system trying to protect us, and how our fight-or-flight mechanisms can get stuck, can significantly lessen the fear experienced during anxiety attacks. In this guide, anxiety is explained in an easy-to-understand, engaging graphic format with tips and strategies to relieve its symptoms, and change the mind's habits for a more positive outlook.

Why can't we tickle ourselves? How can slow touch convey more powerful emotions than fast touch? How does touch shape our perception of the world? The latest addition to the Really Strange series, this science-based graphic comic addresses these questions and more, revealing the complexity of touch and exploring its power and limits. Used positively, touch can change pain and trauma, communicate compassion and love and generate social bonding. Get it wrong and it can be abusive and terrifying. Touch helps us feel real. Knowledge comes through our body as we engage with space and with others. Before we have language, our concepts are formed as we meet a world full of edges and textures. Touch is Really Strange celebrates the power of inward touch (interoception) and looks at how we can use skilful contact to promote feelings of joy, connection and vitality.

Dr. John E. Sarno's groundbreaking research on TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome) reveals how stress and other psychological factors can cause back pain-and how you can be pain free without drugs, exercise, or surgery. Dr. Sarno's program has helped thousands of patients find relief from chronic back conditions. In this New York Times bestseller, Dr. Sarno teaches you how to identify stress and other psychological factors that cause back pain and demonstrates how to heal yourself--without drugs, surgery or exercise. Find out: Why self-motivated and successful people are prone to Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) How anxiety and repressed anger trigger muscle spasms How people condition themselves to accept back pain as inevitable With case histories and the results of in-depth mind-body research, Dr. Sarno reveals how you can recognize the emotional roots of your TMS and sever the connections between mental and physical pain...and start recovering from back pain today.

What is forgiveness? What enables people to forgive? Why do we even choose to forgive those who have harmed us? What can the latest psychological research tell us about the nature of forgiveness, its benefits and risks? This imaginative comic explores the key aspects of forgiveness, asking what it means to forgive and to be forgiven. Witty and intelligent, it answers questions about the health benefits and restorative potential of forgiveness and explains, in easy-to-understand terms, what happens in our brains, bodies and communities when we choose to forgive.

A full-scale investigation of the controversial and often misunderstood science of attachment theory, inspired by the author’s own experience as a parent and daughter. “A profound and beautiful work . . . searingly honest, brazenly fresh, and startlingly rich.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon When professional researcher and writer Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she loved her deeply but felt as if something was missing. Looking back at her lonely childhood, dangerous teenage years, and love-addicted early adulthood, Saltman thought maybe she was broken. Then she discovered the science of attachment, the field of psychology that explores the question of why—from an evolutionary point of view—love exists between parents and children. Saltman went on a ten-year journey visiting labs, archives, and training sessions, while learning the meaning of “delight” from Mary Ainsworth, one of psychology’s most important but unsung researchers, who died in 1999. Saltman went deep into the history and findings from Ainsworth’s famous laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, which, like an X-ray, is still used today by scientists around the world to catch a glimpse of the internal workings of attachment. In this simple twenty-minute procedure, a baby and a caregiver enter an ordinary room with two chairs and some toys. During a series of comings and goings, a trained observer studies the minutiae of the pair’s back-and-forth with each other. Through the science of attachment, what Saltman discovered was a radical departure from everything she thought she knew—about love and about her own family, her story, and herself. She was far from broken—she saw that love is too powerful to ever break. Strange Situation is a scientific, lyrical, life-affirming exploration of love. Not only will readers be taken on an emotional ride through one mother’s reckoning with her own past and her family’s future, but they will also be given the tools with which to better understand their own life histories and their relationships today. Praise for Strange Situation “A fascinating deep dive into attachment theory . . . Carefully researched and with copious endnotes, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in child development.”—Publishers Weekly “Honest and complex . . . A thoughtful engagement with a topic that affects all parents.”—Kirkus Reviews

Solid evidence now shows that knowing why we hurt will help us heal. All pain is real, and for many people it is a debilitating part of everyday life. In a world where 1 in 5 of us experience ongoing pain and where there is increasing evidence for the failure of synthetic drugs, take heart: help is at hand. It is now known that understanding more about why things hurt can actually help treat pain. Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology have provided an explanatory platform from which to explore pain. In everyday language accompanied by quirky illustrations, Explain Pain Second Edition discusses how pain responses are produced by the brain, how responses to injury from the autonomic motor and immune systems in your body contribute to pain, and why pain can persist after tissues have had plenty of time to heal. Co-author Dr David Butler, founder of the Neuro Orthopaedic Institute, says that "it is no longer acceptable that pain be just managed: we must expect that it can be treated, and sufferers can alter it themselves through education." Explain Pain has sold around 60,000 copies world-wide in 5 languages and continues to inspire clinical research and multidisciplinary pain treatment globally. Explain Pain aims to give people in pain the power to challenge pain and to consider new models for viewing what happens to your body and brain during pain. Once they have learnt about the processes involved they can follow a scientific route to recovery. Why a second edition? A decade of scientific research is a lot – and we need to keep on top of it. In the last 10 years there has been increasing support for therapeutic neuroscience education from clinical trials, educational science, neuroscience, plain logic and the failure of drug therapy on chronic pain outcomes. Lorimer and David have subtly changed some of the language so that the second edition can be delivered with much more authority than the first. Noigroup Publications (2013), 133 pages, 90+ illustrations and diagrams, half-canadian wire bound. ISBN: 978-0-9873426-6-9 Authors: Dr David S. Butler and Prof G. Lorimer Moseley.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.