Affect Regulation Theory: A Clinical Model

ESSENTIAL reading for mental health professionals.
I've said it before, but this book really should have the reputation of The Body Keeps Score - because it achieves what many want out of Van Der Kolk's book, but better, I'd say!
If that isn't the best endorsement, I don't know what is.

Don't be put off by the dry title. Although academic, this work is accessible and not too difficult to read. It's definitely more academic that your average pop-psychology bestseller, but any reader with an interest in relational trauma or emotion regulation willing to get into some more science-y non-fiction would love it.

In Affect Regulation Theory, Daniel Hill clearly and efficiently integrates existing research and understandings of the neuroscience of the nervous system (think fight/flight/freeze) with attachment research (think insecure attachment styles) and contemporary understandings of trauma symptomology including dissociation and the pattern of symptoms often labelled Borderline Personality Disorder.

Hill ties together the more recent advances in psychological research by Allan Schore, Peter Fonagy, and Judith Herman with attachment researchers and theorists like Dan Siegel, Main, Ainsworth and Bowlby. It has a warm endorsement from Pat Ogden, founder of sensorimotor therapy.

The book is structured well and starts with probably the best explanation of the neuroscience of the autonomic nervous system and limbic system I've read, then summarises how these parts of the nervous system develop with reference to early attachment experiences. Hill then moves on to using these interpersonal neurobiology frameworks to describe common pathologies and symptoms in relational trauma, summarises mentalisation theory, and at the end provides some practical examples of rupture and repair in adult therapy (ie how the insecure attachment underlying relational trauma symptoms can be repaired in the therapeutic relationship).

In this way Affect Regulation Theory provides a kind of capstone or grand integration of cutting edge psychological approaches to date, tying together broad swathes of research that are often less accessible and more academically dense or scientific in structure and language.
If you are going to read one interpersonal neurobiology book, make it this one.