A review by eleana
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb

challenging reflective medium-paced

3.25

I found this book interesting in many ways. I can imagine this being very helpful to someone picking this up who's never been in therapy before, and I'll definitely take some bits of advice from this as well. I did find it a bit uncomfortable how trauma is simplified in this and not particularly acknowledged. Dr Jonice herself acknowledges there's no research on Emotional Neglect and if you look at her references at the end of this book it's all about trauma and attachment theory, so it did feel a bit odd how little those are mentioned. This was marketed at the person with "no trauma, but something is wrong" and it did feel like she was trying to sell herself as an expert in something new, but this is well studied. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly, but it felt a bit more insidious than other psychology books I've read that deal with similar issues and the constant mentions of her website and the expert of book 2 on emotional neglect (which has an identical intro to this one!) made me all the more uncomfortable. For those reasons I wouldn't necessarily recommend this unless you read a lot more psychology and self help books first and form a fuller picture.