As sexual compulsives, we live almost continually with shame but often are hardly aware of it. We can act out repeatedly on this secret, pervasive shame while never even knowing it’s there. By increasing our awareness of the role that long-term shame plays in our lives, we can begin to heal from its toxic effects. The eradication of shame is critical for mental health and recovery over time. SCA sponsored a three-part seminar on shame in the spring and summer of 1990, attended almost entirely by gay and lesbian members. An SCA literature committee reworked and revised the notes from these sessions over six months. The committee preparing SCA’s Recovery Book further enhanced and revised the material. This pamphlet reflects these additions and revisions.

J.J. Graves is back in Bloody Mary, but she's a long way from feeling at home. Between her bodily scars from being the target of a murderer and the emotional scars left by her parents, she doesn't know who she can trust. But death doesn't stop for anyone. The first murder is grisly. The second even more so. And though things are shaky between them, she and her best friend, Jack, have no choice but to join forces and find the killer. Because the life of someone they love dearly hangs in the balance.

New York Times bestselling author, Tess Oliver, brings you a sexy new adult romance, Book 1 of the Bluefield Bad Boys series.We were prisoners of forbidden love, just like Romeo and Juliet but without the poetic, old English double speak and Italian marble balconiesA coal miner's son, Kellan Braddock always knew he'd follow in his late dad's steel toed boots. He also always knew that he'd never love anyone as much he loved Rylan Merritt. But sometimes love isn't enough.Seven years ago, Rylan Merritt left Bluefield Ridge with her heart in tatters. Now she's back. And Kellan Braddock, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, the boy who she loved beyond anything has grown into a man. Will she risk her heart again? The story of a first love so strong it never fades.WARNING: contains adult content. Intended for readers 18+

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A clear-eyed warning about the increasingly destructive influence of America’s “shame industrial complex” in the age of social media and hyperpartisan politics—from the New York Times bestselling author of Weapons of Math Destruction “O’Neil reminds us that we must resist the urge to judge, belittle, and oversimplify, and instead allow always for complexity and lead always with empathy.”—Dave Eggers, author of The Every Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool: When we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities, or predatory corporations, we reinforce values of fairness and justice. But as Cathy O’Neil argues in this revelatory book, shaming has taken a new and dangerous turn. It is increasingly being weaponized—used as a way to shift responsibility for social problems from institutions to individuals. Shaming children for not being able to afford school lunches or adults for not being able to find work lets us off the hook as a society. After all, why pay higher taxes to fund programs for people who are fundamentally unworthy? O’Neil explores the machinery behind all this shame, showing how governments, corporations, and the healthcare system capitalize on it. There are damning stories of rehab clinics, reentry programs, drug and diet companies, and social media platforms—all of which profit from “punching down” on the vulnerable. Woven throughout The Shame Machine is the story of O’Neil’s own struggle with body image and her recent weight-loss surgery, which awakened her to the systematic shaming of fat people seeking medical care. With clarity and nuance, O’Neil dissects the relationship between shame and power. Whom does the system serve? Is it counter-productive to call out racists, misogynists, and vaccine skeptics? If so, when should someone be “canceled”? How do current incentive structures perpetuate the shaming cycle? And, most important, how can we all fight back?

Readers were instantly beguiled by Rob Brezsny's new approach to the humble horoscope when his "Free Will Astrology" column first appeared in 1996. Instead of the generic, one-size-fits-all style of similar columns, Brezsny used witty parables, tender rants, cultural riffs, pagan wisdom, and lively rituals in his playfully positive readings. He brings that same sensibility—and the same message of a smiling universe—to this self-help book for people who may be skeptical about self-help books. Brezsny persuasively advises readers to go along with the universe's good intentions, but his rejection of cynicism and a bleak view of human nature isn't rooted in denial. On the contrary, he makes a case for a cagey optimism that requires a vigorous engagement with the dark forces. He asks us to rethink life as a sublime game created for our amusement and illumination. The book is a chameleon of a tome. You can read it straight through, slowly and surely, or else pick it up and open it at random for tasty hits of inspiration as the spirit moves you. You can even start at the end and weave your way backward. Brezsny has substantially updated this edition—he added nearly one hundred pages—by expanding various sections, adding more than a dozen new pieces and a new chapter, and providing readers with a number of playtime activities and exercises that let them participate through their own writing and drawing. "Brezsny's horoscopes are like little valentines, buoyant and spilling over with mischievousness. They're a soul prognosis." —The New York Times

In this book Stephanie Bull and Kevin O’Farrell bring together practising clinicians who provide an insight into using contemporary art therapy with people with learning disabilities. The authentic voice of people who have learning disabilities is central to the book, and case examples, snapshots of thoughts, dialogue, photographs and artwork are included to ensure that the subjects' voices are heard. The book covers: having a learning disability loss and bereavement attachment and separation infantilisation fear powerlessness self and identity. This accessible and thought-provoking book is essential reading for anyone involved with people with learning disabilities including art therapists, psychotherapists, counsellors, students and carers.

During the 1950s, thousands of mixed race children were born to US servicemen and local Korean women in US-occupied South Korea. Assumed to be the progeny of camptown women--or military prostitutes--their presence created a major problem for the image of US democracy in the world at a time when the nation was vying for Cold War allegiances abroad. As mixed race children became a discernible population around US military encampments in South Korea, communists seized upon the image of those left behind by their GI fathers as evidence of US imperialism, irresponsibility, and immorality in the Third World. Aware of this and keen to redeem the image of America's intervention in Asia, US citizens spearheading the postwar recovery of recently war-torn South Korea embarked upon a campaign in US Congress to bring as many of these children home. By the early 1960s, American philanthropists, missionaries, and voluntary agencies had succeeded in constructing the figure of the abandoned and mistreated Amerasian orphan to lobby US Congress for the quick passage of intercountry adoption laws. They also gained the sympathies of American families, eager to welcome these racially different children into the intimate confines of their homes. Although the adoptions of Korean "Amerasian" children helped to promote an image of humanitarian rescue and Cold War racial liberalism in 1950s and 1960s America, there was one other problem: many of these children were not actually orphans, but had been living with their Korean mothers in the camptown communities surrounding US military bases prior to adoption. Their placements into American families relied upon dehumanizing constructions of these women as hardened prostitutes who did not even love their own children, South Korea as a backwards, racist society bent-up on Confucian tradition and pure bloodlines, and the United States as a welcoming home in an era of intense racial segregation. The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers to adoptive US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, Yuri W. Doolan reveals how the Amerasian is not simply a mixed race person fathered by a US serviceman in Asia nor a racial term used to describe individuals with one American and one Asian parent like its popular definition suggests. Rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose rescue has been utilized to repudiate accusations of US imperialism and achieve sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won by the military. From such constructions, Americans lobbied Congress twice: first, in the 1950s to establish international adoption laws that would lead to the placement of hundreds of thousands of Korean children in the United States, then, later in the 1980s, when the plight of mixed race Koreans would be invoked again to argue for Amerasian immigration laws culminating in the migrations of tens of thousands of mixed race Vietnamese and their relatives. Beyond Cold War historiography, this book also shows how in using the figure of the mistreated and abandoned Amerasian in need of rescue, Americans caused harm to actual people--mixed race Koreans and their mothers specifically--as children were placed into adoptive homes during an era where few regulations or safeguards existed to protect them from abuse, negligence, or racial hostilities in the US and many Korean mothers were coerced, both physically and monetarily, to relinquish their children to American authorities.