Sanjidah 
Format: Audiobook
Published: 28 September 2023
Genre: Self-help, wellbeing, psychology
Find out more about the book here: Storygraph | Goodreads
Purchase the book here*: Bookshop.org | Waterstones | World of Books
It’s time to bring therapy out of the therapy room and into the real world.
In recent years, therapy and self-care have become familiar buzzwords, but it’s clear that people are having to face their emotional difficulties without the tools and insight to work through them. Enter Real Talk: A book to enable readers to have genuine, authentic conversations with themselves, and to start the journey of healing their past experiences and cope with the challenges of modern life.
Filled with techniques and wisdom from a therapist’s toolkit this is a must-have handbook for optimising your mental health. Drawing on her experience as a qualified psychotherapist and applying her intersectional perspective Tasha Bailey shares the knowledge and skills you need to change your life.
* A copy of this book was given in exchange for an honest review. This post may contain affiliate links.
There isn’t really a substitute for therapy. Therapy is or should be a very personal, tailored experience. That said, this book comes very close.
Something that I really like about this book is that it touches on lots of different facets of the human experience: early childhood, social life, familial life, relationships, and more. It’s like a whistle stop tour of everything you might bring to therapy, and there are lots of exercises and thinking points that help tie chapters’ contents neatly with a bow. This book also contains something therapy does not normally come with: the author’s own personal experiences. The experiences the author shares help to demonstrate how issues can affect us and she role models how such issues could be addressed.
As a therapist, I really like the different theoretical approaches this book draws from, it’s very integrative in that sense. I saw one or two reviews from people who aren’t therapists comment on confusion around the concepts in this book which I don’t attribute to the author. Sometimes you just have to trust the process and that’s definitely the case with this book – to go into it with an open mind.
As mentioned previously, this book isn’t a substitute for therapy and there might be parts or whole chapters that aren’t applicable to everyone. But the sections in this book are neatly ordered and titled so you can go back to things easily if you would like to. I was given this book in audio format which I definitely recommend; the author’s delivery is very endearing; it is almost like literal therapy. I recommend this book for everyone, but especially people who have never had or are only just starting therapy. I have already bought a hardcopy of this book for a friend and I intend to purchase more copies.
