Resources for Understanding What Shapes Us
Books, videos, reading recommendations, and practical tools for understanding behavior, relationships, and the stories behind them.
The Friend Game
Before The Friend Effect became a book, it began with a simple way of examining how the people around us influence our decisions, expectations, and direction.
Watch Mark explain The Friend Game and the thinking behind it. Watch the video.
Explore The Friend Effect
Learn how relationships shape who we become and where our lives are headed.
Recommended Reading
These books represent the broader reading and research behind Mark’s work. Some are written for general readers, while others offer a deeper academic or professional examination of behavior, adolescence, relationships, family systems, grief, and change.
Recommended for General Readers
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships
Eric Berne
Explores the predictable, repetitive interactions people enter without realizing they are following an established script.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Examines self-justification, defensiveness, and the stories people construct to protect their decisions and self-image.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg
Explains how habits form, become automatic, and can be deliberately changed.
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
Explores self-control, decision-making, and the conditions that strengthen or weaken follow-through.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B. Cialdini
Explains the psychological principles that shape decisions, including commitment, consistency, social proof, authority, and reciprocity.
The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control
Walter Mischel
Examines delayed gratification, impulse control, and the development of self-regulation.
Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence
Laurence Steinberg
Presents adolescence as a critical period of brain development, learning, identity formation, risk, and opportunity.
Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
An accessible explanation of how the adolescent brain changes and how those changes affect behavior, judgment, relationships, and identity.
The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier
Susan Pinker
Explores how close relationships and regular human connection affect physical health, cognition, resilience, and longevity.
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Robert D. Putnam
Examines social connection, community involvement, belonging, and the consequences of declining social capital.
Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram
Explores how authority and social pressure can influence ordinary people’s decisions and behavior.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
A classic exploration of suffering, responsibility, and the human need to find meaning when circumstances cannot be changed.
The behavioral and adolescent titles above are drawn from the research and reference sections of The Child in Charge, Contracts Not Conflict, Neurons and Narratives, and The Friend Effect.
For Parents and Families
The Family Contract: A Blueprint for Successful Parenting
Howard I. Leftin, M.D.
The foundational practitioner book on written, privilege-based agreements between parents and teenagers.
Coercive Family Process
Gerald R. Patterson
Explains how cycles of resistance, escalation, surrender, and reinforcement can unintentionally create lasting family behavior patterns.
Antisocial Boys
Gerald R. Patterson, John B. Reid, and Thomas J. Dishion
Examines the family and peer processes associated with the development of serious behavioral problems in boys.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman and Nan Silver
Offers practical principles for building trust, managing conflict, and strengthening close relationships.
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail
John Gottman
Examines the recurring communication and behavioral patterns that predict relationship stability or breakdown.
I’m OK, You’re OK
Thomas A. Harris
Applies Transactional Analysis to everyday communication, recurring conflict, and self-understanding.
Loving Someone in Recovery
Beverly Berg
Addresses the emotional experience of loving someone with addiction, including damaged trust, repeated hope, disappointment, and the toll on the relationship.
The Grief Recovery Handbook
John W. James and Russell Friedman
Provides a practical process for addressing grief and unfinished emotional business following a loss.
Option B
Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant
Combines personal experience with research on sudden loss, resilience, and rebuilding life after circumstances change permanently.
The family-contract research specifically identifies Leftin’s work as the foundational practitioner source, while the grief titles are directly recommended in When Recovery Never Came.
Grief, Trauma, and Loss
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
Mary-Frances O’Connor
Explains the neuroscience of grief and how the brain gradually learns to live in a world where someone important is no longer physically present.
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
Examines how trauma affects the brain, nervous system, body, memory, and relationships.
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief
Pauline Boss
The foundational text on losses that lack clarity or closure, including loving someone who is physically present but psychologically absent.
Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow
Edited by Kenneth J. Doka
Explores grief that is not fully acknowledged, understood, or supported by society.
Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss
Edited by Robert A. Neimeyer
Examines how people rebuild meaning, identity, and their understanding of life following a significant loss.
Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief
Edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman
Challenges the belief that healthy grief requires severing the relationship with the deceased and instead explores how that relationship changes form.
The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation
Stephen W. Porges
Explores the nervous system’s role in safety, threat, emotional regulation, relationships, and co-regulation.
Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions
James W. Pennebaker
Examines the psychological and physical effects of writing and speaking honestly about difficult experiences.
On Death and Dying
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The original work that introduced the widely known stages associated with people confronting their own mortality.
These titles appear in the Further Reading and chapter notes of When Recovery Never Came. The manuscript distinguishes between books directly recommended to general readers and foundational works supporting its grief, trauma, and nervous-system concepts.
Childhood, Identity, and Development
Attachment and Loss
John Bowlby
Bowlby’s foundational three-volume study of attachment, separation, loss, and the lasting influence of early relationships.
Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, Mary C. Blehar, Everett Waters, and Sally Wall
Presents the landmark research behind commonly recognized attachment patterns.
Identity: Youth and Crisis
Erik H. Erikson
A foundational examination of identity development and the psychological challenges involved in moving toward adulthood.
The Ecology of Human Development
Urie Bronfenbrenner
Explains how people are shaped by overlapping systems, including family, school, community, institutions, and culture.
Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry
Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry III
Examines adolescence across cultures and the ways societies organize the transition from childhood into adult responsibility.
Social Learning Theory
Albert Bandura
Explains how people learn through observation, imitation, modeling, reinforcement, and consequences.
Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy
Eric Berne
Introduces Berne’s Parent, Adult, and Child ego-state framework and the clinical foundations of Transactional Analysis.
Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide
Jeffrey E. Young, Janet S. Klosko, and Marjorie E. Weishaar
A clinical examination of deeply established beliefs, emotional patterns, coping responses, and behaviors rooted in early experience.
For Deeper Study
The Behavior of Organisms
B. F. Skinner
A foundational work in behavioral psychology examining reinforcement, conditioning, and the relationship between behavior and consequences.
Handbook of Adolescent Psychology
Edited by Richard M. Lerner and Laurence Steinberg
A comprehensive professional reference covering adolescent brain development, identity, relationships, behavior, and social context.
Handbook of Child Psychology
Edited by William Damon and others
A broad academic reference on child development, learning, family relationships, socialization, and behavior.
Handbook of Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups
Edited by Kenneth H. Rubin, William M. Bukowski, and Brett Laursen
Examines friendship, peer influence, social groups, belonging, rejection, and their effects on development.
Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Analysis and Model for Intervention
Edited by John B. Reid, Gerald R. Patterson, and James Snyder
Explores the developmental, family, and social conditions associated with persistent behavioral problems.
These more technical works appear as foundational texts or book-length research sources in the manuscripts’ research sections.
More Tools Are on the Way
New discussion guides, videos, reading recommendations, and book companion resources will be added as they become available.