My Most Meaningful Reads of 2023

Happy new year! I thought I’d start the year by reflecting on the top books I shared with people I worked with in 2023. These books vary in their perspective and approach, but they all have one thing in common: to help us fare better in our close relationships, whether with our parents, children, friends or partners. 

As social, interdependent creatures, healthy relationships are crucial for our survival. A lot of mental health struggles are rooted in the way we see ourselves in relationship to others. These struggles can feel very high stakes because of just how important relationships are to our wellbeing. 

Just as healthy relationships keep us safe and motivated in life, unhealthy ones also affect lasting damage. These books contain stories of healing from relational trauma, told through both personal and professional lenses. They explore frameworks of thinking, communicating, listening and feeling that enable us to understand and grow from our early relational wounds, so that we might relate to ourselves and others with a little less fear, and much more freedom.

I’ve highlighted just a few key ideas that resonated with me in each book. I hope they can inspire us to read on, and discover more about our relational journeys in the year ahead.

1. Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) (2019)

Psychotherapist Philippa Perry pours her expertise from working with parents and families into this book. Drawing from a variety of cases as well as her own experience as a parent, Perry explores the pains and pitfalls of parenting with vulnerability, humour and humanity, while offering suggestions on how the process can be made more meaningful and enjoyable. While primarily a book on parenting, Perry’s ideas can apply to all relationships at any stage in life.

Rupture and repair: the crux of all relationships
Psychologist Donald Winnicott once said that there’s no such thing as a “good mother”, only a “good enough mother”. This distinction helps us understand that disappointing our children (which causes a rupture in the relationship) is an inevitable part of parenting, as it’s virtually impossible to meet their needs at all times. Rupture can feel scary, but is a normal and necessary part of any relationship.

What’s important in a parent-child relationship is not to avoid rupture entirely, but to repair the relationship afterwards, when children experience painful feelings – feeling let down, sad, disappointed or angry. This way, children are provided the support they need to understand their feelings, and to cope with them.

Children (and adults) need to be felt with, not dealt with
Engaging in repair – acknowledging a difficult situation and helping children articulate their feelings about it – will grow their capacity to self-soothe.

This could look like giving voice to a feeling, e.g. “you’re feeling sad because we have to go home now”, and asking them what they need to feel better, e.g. “would you like me to hold your hand while we walk back?” 

Perry makes it clear that this is not the same as distracting a child from pain, as distraction just creates the impression that difficult feelings should be ignored. Children gradually learn that it’s okay to be with their feelings if the adults in their lives can consistently hold space for them. 

Safely experiencing all feelings – not just the pleasant ones – makes it possible to accept them as both tolerable and transient. Practicing this safety with caregivers and peers develops self-regulation and resilience in future, both of which are the basis of healthy relationships, and a healthy life.

2. Lindsay Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)

Emotional immaturity: when deep connections are difficult
The title of this book caught my attention immediately. Coming from an East-Asian background, any reference to one’s parents is always assumed to be positive and complementary; to see the phrase “emotionally immature parents” was jarring, to say the least. 

But I trusted psychologist Lindsay Gibson to lead the way through her book, which breaks down emotional immaturity into four distinct different categories: the emotional parent, the driven parent, the passive parent, and the rejecting parent.

For Gibson, “immaturity” isn’t a judgement; in relational terms it simply describes someone who persistently struggles to regulate their own emotions and form a deep connection with others.

Emotional maturity makes for better relationships
The book’s tone is objective and clear, presenting plenty of cases that illustrate what emotionally immature parenting looks like in its different forms, and how it impacts a person from childhood through to adulthood. Turns out the impact can be lasting, instilling a range of limiting habits in people that renders relationships far from satisfying. 

Thankfully, Gibson provides a range of tools for developing a closer attunement to our own needs, including setting boundaries through action and communication, as well as ways to recognise emotional maturity in others, so that deeper connections can form.

3. Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma (2022)

The most hard-hitting of the books mentioned here, radio journalist Stephanie Foo’s memoir goes into the darkest recesses of her abusive childhood in an attempt to understand her diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or C-PTSD. While Foo’s account of her childhood and adolescence is heart-wrenching to read, it ultimately makes her healing journey that much more moving to witness.

C-PTSD affects both mental and physical health
Foo pulls no punches in asserting that C-PTSD is a lifelong condition that puts the body and mind in perpetual “fight or flight” mode. Her experience sheds light on just how detrimental long-term abuse can be to one’s health and development, with effects that last well into adulthood. 

A history of abuse, even if the abuse is no longer occurring in the present, puts the mind and body in a state of chronic panic and withdrawal – the body has been wired to pre-empt attack, and constantly reacts to protect itself against perceived threats. 

A huge part of Foo’s healing is rooted in recognising her nervous system’s survival responses as byproducts of her trauma, and not standard responses that everyone has. Foo discovers that daily life should not feel so dangerous, and that with some work, she can learn to find safety in both herself and with the new people in her life.

Relationships: where healing happens
An idea that comes up in my work a lot is the idea of “re-parenting” ourselves – that we as adults can come to know our inner child and try to protect, guide and care for them as a loving parent would. Through the examination of our early relational wounds in therapy, we discover which of our needs were unmet growing up, and ways of meeting those needs for ourselves today.

Foo comes to realise that she unfortunately never had a loving relationship with her parents growing up and never will, but is therefore committed to re-parenting her inner child, who is still with her every day. She learns to love and nurture her inner child through the consistent support of her partner, her partner’s family, and her therapist Dr Ham. 

Foo’s story shows us that if our inner children are used to being abused or neglected, then the warped assumption of “I don’t deserve love” remains. But over time, if we can experience the opposite of abuse consistently enough, a new reality – where safe, fulfilling relationships are the norm and not the exception – can start to bloom.