Harper How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

This is amazing I waited a wile to receive the book. Day 3 i have received it and I feel i have hope for change in life. Thank you for understanding people.

I was so excited to get this book as love the Instagram page. Unfortunately it was so disappointing, it is very basic and does not offer clear advice on how to make changes. The author's free Instagram page is actually more helpful.

I’ve seen some horrible reviews on here that shocked me. This book is amazing and it does not recommend you stopping medication, therapy or anything else. Dr. Nicole even mentions that therapy is helpful and without psychology school she wouldn’t be where she is today. This book talks about racism, about minorities and how life itself can be really traumatic for them. This book shows you ways to start making changes in your life. Step by step, learning about yourself, your ego and inner child, your traumas, your attachment styles, how to set boundaries etc. It’s a great book! One of the greatest psychology books I’ve ever read. More people need to talk about nutrition, about the soul, about the gut and mind connection, about healing the root cause of the problem and not just numbing the symptoms with substances. This is amazing. I really recommend it and I believe this way of healing yourself is way more beneficial than just labeling your issue as a mental illness forever and going on with your life.

In response to the bad reviews- This book was an amazing read! I am actually shocked at the obviously malicious few reviews on here, which have clearly been written out of spite- you should have these removed as they do not reflect reality. They accuse the author of racism which is unfounded.The book is not anti-black! Nowhere in this book does Nicole make any racists remarks. Another review mentions the book has no solutions- literally every single chapter offers solutions at the end and exercises you can do to help with your healing. This book was also criticised for trying to be a replacement for therapy and medication. Nicole does not urge anyone to do that in her content or book! Anyone should be able to do some self reflection, how is that a bad thing?Now moving on to my review..It was a very easy read and I can honestly say thank you Nicole for this book. It is enlightening and gives me hope for myself, my well-being and for the relationships I have with other people in my life. What you can expect from the book is learning about the act of being conscious in our day to day lives, about how to set healthy boundaries in situations where we could not before or didn’t know how, about family trauma and its effects on the body, things you can do to help your body get rid of trauma, meeting seeing and healing your inner child, reparenting your inner child, core beliefs, the ego and what role it plays in our life, how we can actively be conscious to loosen the ego and much more. If more people read a book like this and DO THE WORK, maybe the world would be filled with nicer less resentful people.

I bought this book because I follow her Instagram. I like the premise that yoga/nutrition/integrative health can drastically improve your mental health. This isn’t new but it is interesting. I found this book to be extremely problematic. The idea is that your childhood (and only your childhood) is to blame for your mental health problems. She never discusses any other cause. (When there can be MANY.) Most of the book is blaming her parents for her mental health issues. Which gets old fast. She even states that her adverse childhood experience is a 1 out of 10. A lot of the parent archetypes discussed are based in familial programming, not so much straightforward trauma or abuse. I agree with what others have said that she is very trauma uninformed. Any book or person who claims to have the answer for every problem you have should be a giant red flag. What does she stand to gain by saying that? A lot of money. This is a manipulate sales tactic. Also, yes she throws in a few sentences about racism almost as if it was an after the fact and needed to squeeze them in.With that being said, this is a decent book to read as a parent so you are aware that you can literally do the best you can, have a child with an adverse childhood experience of 1 and she might still write a book about how you severely damaged her mental health.This book is very much “victim play and blame everyone else” so if that’s not your thing buy another book. All the anecdotes/studies/ideas I found interesting from the book came from other books anyway.Also, the work? What the entire book is named after? Is not even clearly laid out but from what I gather it’s journaling, breath work and yoga.

***Note for abuse survivors: this book largely dismisses purposeful trauma because she doesn’t believe anyone is evil or harmful without suffering some kind of trauma during childhood. She writes things that are actually quite harmful to those who have been abused and though she isn’t trying to intentionally hurt anyone, she further perpetuates what many survivors were made to feel when they were being abused: it’s their fault and not the fault of the abuser.I have a real problem with this woman. I am a former psychologist, and I bought her book because some of what she has posted on social media really resonated with me. I found her work very interesting but the book doesn’t account for experiences outside of ones like her own. She also doesn’t use concrete scientific, peer-reviewed evidence. She uses pseudoscience, and a whole hell of a lot of it. This is mostly fluff. True work doesn’t come from a poorly written and disorganized books. It was legitimately hard to read because of how jumbled many of the paragraphs were.Furthermore, though she calls herself a trauma expert, she is happy to delete comments on her Instagram posts and then block the people who disagree with her. An ETHICAL and PROFESSIONAL mental health practitioner would NEVER invalidate someone’s experiences or emotions, and yet she was happy to remove the messages that criticized her for posting harmful messages that invalidated abuse survivors. Myself and other mental health professionals pointed this out on Instagram to her and her followers and she had the audacity to remove everything even though she was the one in the wrong. If you’re looking for a book to help you, please seek out a mental health professional who is in a position to recommend something legitimately scientific and designed to be more than a long social media post.