Stage fright is one of the human psyche's deepest fears. Over half of British adults name public speaking as their greatest fear, even greater than heights and snakes. Laurence Olivier learned to adapt to it, as have actors Salma Hayek and Hugh Grant. Musicians such as Paul McCartney and Adele have battled it and learned to cope. Playing Scared is Sara Solovitch's journey into the myriad causes of stage fright and the equally diverse ways we can overcome it. As a young child, Sara studied piano and fell in love with music. As a teen, she played Bach and Mozart at her hometown's annual music festival, but was overwhelmed by stage fright, which led her to give up aspirations of becoming a professional pianist. In her late fifties, Sara gave herself a one-year deadline to tame performance anxiety and play before an audience. She resumed music lessons, while exploring meditation, exposure therapy, cognitive therapy, biofeedback and beta blockers, among many other remedies. She practiced performing in airports, hospitals and retirement homes. Finally, the day before her sixtieth birthday, she gave a formal recital for an audience of fifty. Using her own journey as inspiration, Sara has written a thoughtful and insightful cultural history of performance anxiety and a tribute to pursuing personal growth at any age.

Everyone knows what it is to be afraid. But phobias take the normal (and even helpful!) human emotion of fear to a much more visceral, even primal, place. For some people, it’s a spider that does it. For others it’s a clown, or a trans-Atlantic flight, or even just a puddle of water. It’s the thing that stops us in our tracks, sets our hearts racing, and stands our hairs on end. Scared Stiff takes readers on a journey through these experiences—using biology, psychology, and history (not to mention pop culture) to explain where our phobias came from, how they affect us, and how we might eventually overcome them.

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of "competing inter-Americanisms" as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit.

Handbook of Conceptualization and Treatment of Child Psychopathology evaluates and illustrates the integration of conceptualization and treatment of child and adolescent psychopathology. Organized into seven parts, this book first discusses the issues of conceptualization and developmental considerations in treatment. Subsequent part delineates treatment models and specific interventions for disruptive behavior disorders. Parts III-VI elucidate mood, anxiety, eating and substance use disorders. The last part covers firesetting, trichotillomania, elimination disorders, schizophrenia, sleep problems, and dissociative disorders. This handbook is an educational tool for graduate students and a resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, school counselors, social workers, and other mental health practitioners who treat children and adolescents and their families.

How do you forgive when the wound is still open? People often ask Sarah, "How did you forgive your alcoholic mother?” How do you forgive someone who carelessly brushed aside your pain, who caused such destruction, and who doesn’t show remorse? How do you know when to stay and when to go? In The Complicated Heart, you will travel through Sarah's story with her, from age 14 and beyond, as she wrestles with these very questions. Prepare yourself: she holds nothing back. If you’ve struggled with a difficult relationship, if you’ve felt torn-up and crazy and confused because of it, if you just want to know how to move forward and be okay, this story is for you. Dysfunction does not have to be your destiny or your identity. Victory is on the table. What's more: you’ll not only travel with Sarah, you’ll travel with her mom as well as you read her mom’s journal entries and letters. What goes on in the mind of the person who hurt you the most? In this story, you’ll get a rare peek into that mind and heart. In these pages you'll be reminded that light always finds a way in, even in the deepest darkness, and redemption and joy are possible in the midst of trauma and unmet needs. If you want to learn how to forgive when your wound is still open, heal when circumstances don't change, and become a generational bondage-breaker, The Complicated Heart is for you. And if not for you, for someone you know. Pass it along.