Meet Anna and her 4 parents in the 1st children’s book that celebrates polyamory and all the beautiful and valid forms of loving families.
“Jealousy Survival Guide” Book – Audible Now Available!
Do you want to enjoy the most deeply fulfilling love life possible with multiple partners, but are worried about feelings of jealousy? You’re in luck! Start exploring ethically non-monogamous relationships now using this guidebook with powerful tools for successfully handling the feelings of jealousy.
Recommended Book List – KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!
All of the below books we have personally read, incorporated into our lives, and are recommended by Kitty Chambliss and the Loving Without Boundaries revolutionaries. Many have been reviewed here on the blog.
A Color Named Love
by M.Ellery & Clara Reschke
And That’s Their Family!
by Kailee Coleman
The author wrote this book to teach about diversity in family structures. It celebrates and represents the following family structures: Two Moms, Two Dads, Single Parents, Living with Grandmas, Living with Grandpas, Adoptive Families, Living with Aunts, Living with Uncles, Foster Families, Living with Sisters, Living with Brothers, Group Homes, Stepdads, Stepmoms, Moms and Dads, Nonbinary Parents, Poly families, and Divorced/Separated Families! There are blank pages at the end of the book to draw your own family and draw a family different from yours! The whole book can be sung to the tune of the Addam’s Family!
The Better Boundaries Workbook: A CBT-Based Program to Help You Set Limits, Express Your Needs, and Create Healthy Relationships
by Sharon Martin, MSW, LCSW
If you find yourself feeling responsible for others’ happiness, worrying about letting people down, or struggling to speak up for yourself, you probably have difficulty setting healthy boundaries. Establishing clear personal boundaries is essential to creating and nurturing mutually respectful relationships based on equality. Setting limits can also protect you from getting involved in exploitative relationships, and help you avoid toxic personalities who don’t have your best interests at heart.
This evidence-based workbook will show you how to set healthy boundaries across all aspects of life—without sacrificing your kindness or compassion for others. You’ll learn to define your boundaries and discover why they’re so important for your emotional well-being. You’ll also find a wealth of tips for maintaining boundaries in a “constantly-connected” world, strategies for what to do when people get upset or threatened by your assertiveness, and ways to make sure your needs are met.
Building Open Relationships
by Liz Powell
Have you read “that book” on non-monogamy and still wondered “But how do you actually DO this?” Are you totally great on the theory of open relationships, but feel like you don’t know how it works in practice? Join Dr. Liz Powell, psychologist, speaker, and coach, as she draws from her education, research, and life experience to bring you Building Open Relationships. This new book is an all-inclusive guide to beginning and maintaining your non-monogamous life, no matter where you fall under the non-monogamous umbrella.
Children in Polyamorous Families: Research Findings in Brief
by Dr. Elisabeth A. Sheff
Using the findings from a 25 year research study, this book provides a brief overview of how polyamorous families affect children. First it explains the children’s age-dependent experiences, and then it details the advantages and disadvantages kids encounter in polyamorous families, as well as some of the strategies they use to manage the disadvantages. The book closes with resources for people interested in polyamorous families.
Club 42: A Choose-Your-Own Erotic Fantasy
by Joanna Angel
Naomi, the Brooklyn hipster barista’s life is forever changed after she spills a scolding hot latte on someone and gets fired. She winds up at Club 42, auditions to become a dancer, and what happens next . . . is up to you!
Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You
by Susan Forward
A practical guide to better communication that will break the blackmail cycle for good, by one of the nation’s leading therapists, Susan Forward.
The Ethical Slut : A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures
by Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy
Some regard this as the “bible” of polyamory. Written thoroughly in a very witty, honest, and at times hilarious style. The essential guide for singles and couples who want to explore polyamory in ways that are ethically and emotionally sustainable.
The Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman
Does it seem as though you and your partner(s) are speaking two different languages? The author guides couples in identifying, understanding, and speaking their partner’s primary love language—quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch.
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)
by don Miguel Ruiz
In The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.
Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness
by Lynne Forrest
In this remarkably timely and highly significant book, Lynne outlines a step-by-step process for activating what she calls “observer consciousness” which is the antithesis of victim consciousness.
The Human Magnet Syndrome: The Codependent Narcissist Trap: Surviving Narcissistic Abuse
by Ross Rosenberg
A psychotherapist’s guide to codependency, narcissism, the treatment of narcissistic abuse, and achieving healthy love from yourself and others.
This revised and updated, breakthrough book not only explains why codependents habitually fall prey to harmful and manipulative narcissists, but also why they predictably sabotage their dreams for freedom, happiness, and self-love. Rosenberg’s pioneering work on relationships, codependency, and narcissism is a necessary road map for receiving healthy love—both from others and ourselves.
The Husband Swap
by Louisa Leontiades
With raw and intimate prose, Louisa Leontiades unflinchingly shares her story, with all its drama, passion, joy and conflict as she and her husband stumble, make mistakes, and look for a path to a sustainable polyamorous future. This is not a how-to manual or a guide to polyamory. It is the true story of four ordinary people who challenged monogamy to pursue a utopia of limitless love.
I Need Your Love: Is That True?
by Byron Katie and Michael Katz
This book was suggested to me by a different friend in the poly community and it is equally amazing. It focuses on how to stop seeking love, approval and appreciation and start finding them instead, and focuses heavily on relationships.
It’s Called “Polyamory”: Coming Out About Your Nonmonogamous Relationships
by Tamara Pincus and Rebecca Hiles
In this guide, Tamara Pincus and Rebecca Hiles provide a roadmap for explaining the expansive intricacies of the consensual nonmonogamy spectrum. By fusing personal experience and community research, they break down the various incarnations of polyamorous relationship structures, polyamory’s intersections with race and gender, and the seemingly esoteric jargon of the lifestyle.
Lessons in Love and Life to My Younger Self: A Companion Guide to The Husband Swap
by Louisa Leontiades
Lessons in Love and Life to My Younger Self is the companion guide to the memoir. If you could travel back in time to give yourself advice, what would you say? What does opening your relationship teach you about the nature of life, love and yourself? Could they have avoided the heartache? Did the experience bring limitless love and possibilities, or was it all just one huge mistake?
Love’s Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities
by Kevin Patterson
The issues that make monogamous dating daunting for people of color—shaming and exclusion by white partners, being fetishized, having realities of everyday racism ignored—occur in polyamorous relationships too, and trying “not to see race” only makes it worse. To make polyamorous communities inclusive, we must all acknowledge our part in perpetuating racism and listen to people of color. Love’s Not Color Blind puts forward the framework—through research, anecdotal testimony, and analogy—for understanding, identifying, and confronting racism within polyamorous communities.
Love That Works: 38 Awesome Hacks for Amazing Relationships
by James Fleckenstein
Our intimate relationships are supposed to be joyful, fulfilling, satisfying and lusty, right? Yet about one in five Americans (at least – people will lie to survey takers) report being unhappy in their marriage or relationship. Are you one of them? What if you had the power to fix that? You do!
Loving Conflict
by Max Rivers
Loving Conflict: How your unmet needs chose your partner, fuel your arguments, and reveal the way to deep connection. This book describes how to use the skills we teach our clients, which we call the Teamwork Method, in your own relationship. Once you have these skills (even if it’s only one of you that learns them) you will understand why you keep having those same old arguments. You’ll know what to do differently and will be able to (finally!) unwrap the unopened gifts of love and satisfaction that masquerade as conflict.
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
by Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell
This book was suggested to me by a dear friend in the poly community and it is absolutely amazing. I recommend everyone read it, poly or not. It comes from a very zen perspective about accepting reality… with love.
The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship: A Toltec Wisdom Book
by don Miguel Ruiz
In The Mastery of Love, don Miguel Ruiz illuminates the fear-based beliefs and assumptions that undermine love and lead to suffering and drama in our relationships. Using insightful stories to bring his message to life, Ruiz shows us how to heal our emotional wounds, recover the freedom and joy that are our birthright, and restore the spirit of playfulness that is vital to loving relationships.
Mating Season: Erotic Short Stories
by Lexi Sylver
Lexi’s real erotic adventures and darkest fantasies come to life in this provocative collection of erotic short stories. Mating Season lures you into the depths of the obscene as you read Lexi’s favorite tales of daring group play, sapphic seduction and kinky BDSM.
More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory
by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert
Can you love more than one person? Have multiple romantic partners, without jealousy or cheating? Absolutely! Polyamorous people have been paving the way, through trial and painful error. Now the new book More Than Two can help you find your own way. With completely new material and a fresh approach, Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert wrote More Than Two to expand on and update the themes and ideas in the wildly popular polyamory website.
Night Shift: A Choose-Your-Own Erotic Fantasy
by Joanna Angel
From the sinfully delicious mind of Joanna Angel, founder of adult company BurningAngel and award-winning adult actress and director, comes Night Shift: A Choose-Your-Own Erotic Fantasy!
Nonviolent Communication: A Language Of Life
by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.
I found this book to be incredible – I think it should be required reading for humans who deal with other humans. It touches on many topics such as empathetic listening, learning to express your feelings in a loving, productive way that diffuses conflict and anger and builds trust.
Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
by Tristan Taormino
An excellent overall read on open relationships, dating and relating, complete with great information on jealousy and setting boundaries. Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships — from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory.
The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families
by Dr. Elisabeth Sheff
The Polyamorists Next Door introduces polyamorous families, in which people are free to pursue emotional, romantic, and sexual relationships with multiple people at the same time, openly and with support from their partners, sometimes forming multi-partner relationships, or other arrangements that allow for emotional and sexual freedom within the family system. In colorful and moving details, this book explores how polyamorous relationships come to be, grow and change, manage the ins and outs of daily family life, and cope with the challenges they face both within their families and from society at large. Using polyamorists’ own words, Dr. Elisabeth Sheff examines polyamorous households and reveals their advantages, disadvantages, and the daily lives of those living in them.
The Polyamory Breakup Book: Causes, Prevention, and Survival
by Kathy Labriola
Polyamory is not always easy. With multiple partners often come more complex relationships to navigate. This practical guide looks at the common causes of polyamorous breakups, identifies strategies to avoid ending relationships, and provides you with the toolkit to survive a breakup.
Polyamory Dating Guide: Love is Abundant…If You Know Where to Look
by Dan Williams and Dawn Williams
Realizing that you are polyamorous can be a wonderful insight. It may feel like a solution to a long term feeling that you never fit in with monogamous models. Or it could have been a ‘team decision’ that you have more than enough love to include others. Or perhaps it is something you’ve known from the moment you started to be interested in romance. This book is about finding other people who share your view of polyamory is and want to share it with you.
Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners
by Dr. Deborah Anapol
More of an overview as well as a scientific approach to polyamory, citing history of polyamory, ethical concepts, jealousy, “coming out”, etc. This book weaves together research and facts to provide an informed and impartial analysis of polyamory as a lifestyle and as a movement.
The Polyamory Toolkit: A Guidebook for Polyamorous Relationships
by Dan Williams and Dawn Williams
For nearly two decades Dan and Dawn have navigated their journey in polyamory by being proactive, insightful and analytical. Early on, there was very little information or resources available, so the adventure required them to learn from their mistakes as well as their successes.
Each have multiple partners and have a history of polyamory relationships lasting multiple years. They have put the time and thought into creating a “toolkit” of knowledge others can implement to help their relationships survive and thrive.
Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
by Jessica Fern
Attachment theory has entered the mainstream, but most discussions focus on how we can cultivate secure monogamous relationships. What if, like many people, you’re striving for secure, happy attachments with more than one partner? Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy.
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
This thought provoking book tries to debunk everything we know about “sex” using evidence from anthropology, primatology, psychosexuality, etc. It also speaks of our innate capacities for love, cooperation and generosity.
Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
by Betty Dodson
Confronting one of our last and most deeply rooted taboos—masturbation—noted sex expert and pro-sex feminist Betty Dodson, Ph.D., takes the shame out of self-love by creating a straightforward and appealing guidebook that reveals masturbation as a satisfying, vital form of sexual expression.
Dr. Dodson demonstrates how anyone can learn to make love alone with feelings of guilt or loneliness, and explains why masturbation is sexually and spiritually fulfilling for both men and women. Not only is it the safest sex, but sharing masturbation can also be a sensual treat for couples who want to learn more about each other’s sexual responses.
Stories from the Polycule
by Dr. Elisabeth Sheff
The first of its kind, this anthology brings together stories, poems, drawings and essays created by real people living in polycules. Children describe life with more than two parents; adults share what it’s like to parent with more than one partner. We hear from triads, solos, people who have felt polyamorous their entire lives, and people exploring poly for the first time – all pieces reflect the diverse reality of polyamorous families.
This Heart Holds Many: My Life as the Nonbinary Millennial Child of a Polyamorous Family
by Koe Creation
Many of us were asked by our mother to do the dishes as children. Perhaps some of us would need to be asked more than once. Koe Creation was the type who’d get asked three times, by three different mothers. Crowded parent-teacher conferences, queer youth summer camp, and parental adoptions over potluck dinner were typical of Koe’s upbringing in a queer, polyamorous family. Taught from young age to embrace sex-positivity and LGBT acceptance, Koe had an experience of “family values” that differs wildly from many raised in conservative North America. Still: all families know conflict and all hearts know struggle, no matter how loved. Though a poster child for the alternative Seattle community, Koe yearned for a realization of theirself beyond the “shadow of their tribe.” This drive for a singular identity led Koe to leave the alt-Seattle scene to find the self that no one person or family could make for them. This Heart Holds Many is a testament of transformative, communal love, as told by an educator and life-long learner who has dedicated their life to helping others grasp their extraordinary love.
The Verbally Abusive Relationship, Expanded Third Edition: How to recognize it and how to respond
by Patricia Evans
In this fully expanded and updated third edition of the bestselling classic, you learn why verbal abuse is more widespread than ever, and how you can deal with it. You’ll get more of the answers you need to recognize abuse when it happens, respond to abusers safely and appropriately, and most important, lead a happier, healthier life.
When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous: Understanding Poly People and Relationships
by Dr. Elisabeth Sheff
Having a friend or family member come out to you as polyamorous can be confusing and stressful. Chances are, you have a lot of questions: Is this just a phase? Won’t they settle down someday? What’s going to happen to their kids? Do I have to invite all their partners over for Thanksgiving dinner? Why can’t they just keep it in the bedroom? When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous offers answers to these and more questions, to help you better understand and support your polyamorous loved ones.
Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts
by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
Dr. Harriet Lerner has been studying apologies—and why some people won’t give them—for more than two decades. Now she offers compelling stories and solid theory that bring home how much the simple apology matters and what is required for healing when the hurt we’ve inflicted (or received) is far from simple. Readers will learn how to craft a deeply meaningful “I’m sorry” and avoid apologies that only deepen the original injury.
Why Won’t You Apologize? also addresses the compelling needs of the injured party—the one who has been hurt by someone who won’t apologize, tell the truth, or feel remorse. Lerner explains what drives both the non-apologizer and the over-apologizer, as well as why the people who do the worst things are the least able to own up. She helps the injured person resist pressure to forgive too easily and challenges the popular notion that forgiveness is the only path to peace of mind. With her trademark humor and wit, Lerner offers a joyful and sanity-saving guide to setting things right..