Strong like Water
Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
There's a cost to being a certain kind of strong.
When it comes to difficult circumstances, we've all heard the platitudes: "No pain, no gain." "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But if we spend our lives trying to be "the strong one," we become exhausted, burned-out, and disconnected from our truest selves.
What if it were different? Could there be a different way to be strong? Could strength mean more than pushing on and pushing through pain, bearing every heavy burden on our own? What if, instead, true strength were more like the tide: soft and bold, fierce and gentle, moving together as one powerful force?
In Strong like Water, author and trauma therapist Aundi Kolber offers a framework for true flourishing. With each page, you'll:
• Learn how your nervous system shapes your experience so that we can move through pain instead of being stuck in it.
• Explore various practices, rhythms, and resources to support you in challenging circumstances with compassion and hope.
• Discover how to internalize connection, love, and safety—empowering you with greater resilience.
A different, more expansive way of healing, wholeness, and possibly—especially—strength is possible. We were made to be strong like water.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this inspiring entry, counselor Kolber (Try Softer) encourages readers to redefine their notions of emotional strength. At 22, Kolber writes, she was standing in the crashing waves of the Pacific, distraught after breaking off an engagement and quitting her first postcollege job, when a sudden awareness of God's love helped her find peace. Inspired to forgo rigid notions of strength, she decided to become "strong like water"—a concept that was "rooted in a foundation of love," and allowed her to be both "soft and bold." Kolber aims to help readers achieve such a strength through improved self-knowledge and "compassionate" emotional resources. To that end, she explains situational strength, which can "outwardly appear to carry you through stressful situations," but creates long-term anxiety, and "transitional strength," which promotes healing through "repatterning" trauma responses. She provides an explainer on how the nervous system processes stress, showing that shifting from "fight-flight-fawn" mode to a "window of tolerance" state enables mental flexibility. Finally, she recommends cultivating "compassionate resources" such as inner trust (finding a "soft landing place" in oneself) and emotional flexibility. Kolber offers a healing approach that's compassionate and personal, yet still grounded in practical psychology. Many self-help readers will find value here.
