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When the Ache Remains: Lessons on Tending to the Unfixable and Finding Beauty Anyway

by Lisa Olivera

Making room for pain and beauty

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Hardcover New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Making room for pain and beauty

Drawing on her experience of depression and work as a psychotherapist, Lisa Olivera considers how emotional pain can be tended without being allowed to define all of life. The book brings together personal narrative, humanistic psychology, reflections on nature, and words of nourishment to explore living with depression, grief, and the wider hurts of being human. Its central question is how to remain present to difficulty while still making space for joy and aliveness. Olivera frames care for what cannot simply be fixed not as a route to eliminating pain, but as a way of relating to it with greater openness and compassion.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in reflective approaches to emotional pain and self-care.
  • Readers seeking a personal perspective on living with depression.
  • Readers drawn to books connecting psychology, nature, and personal experience.

Themes

Living with depressionEmotional pain and griefSelf-compassion and presenceFinding joy amid difficulty

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Psychotherapist and author of Already Enough, Lisa Olivera blends her own personal experience of living with depression with therapeutic wisdom in a moving exploration of the emotional pain each of us lives with to offer readers guidance on holding the ache alongside the beauty.

Emotional pain, of all kinds and magnitudes, is part of life. We'll never be able to find ourselves free of it; no meditation or amount of therapy will cure us of the harder parts of being alive. The practice of turning toward the ache with care--reverence, even--might be one of the most meaningful gifts we can give ourselves. It might even save us.

Lisa Olivera has confronted this reality for years as a therapist, weaving her exploration of it throughout her popular newsletter, Human Stuff. She asks questions like, how do we confront and tend to the painful parts of being human without letting that pain entirely overtake us? How do we find joy even when depression visits, even when we lose someone we love, even when the hurt of the world is ever-present? How do we cultivate aliveness in the midst?

When the Ache Remains explores these questions for readers in a tender and wise exploration of how ache shapes life, how we can alchemize our pain into medicine, and how presence is accessible even in the midst of difficulty. Blending deeply personal narrative, humanistic psychology, lessons from nature, words of nourishment, and her naturally poetic undertone, Lisa invites readers on a journey alongside her as she explores the impact of depression and the process of learning to tend to it, and all of our aches, in more open, integrative, and loving ways.
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