As you might expect with a book that covers such an incredible breadth of topics, some areas of this book were really interesting whereas others didn't land for me as a reader. Individual reader mileage will vary with this one! With that in mind, I’m going to share what worked for me as an individual human and what didn’t. It’s really tough to review a book like this without experience, perspective, and preferences creeping in, but that’s kind of the point!

What worked for me:
✦ The first two sections around childhood and attachment styles were fascinating. It was revealing and interesting to see how I, and humans I’ve known, have presented the various attachment styles in different contexts and stages of life.
✦ This was my second ever audio book and I really loved how it was narrated by the author. Not only did it add a layer of authenticity, I didn’t feel like the ‘performance’ was standing between me and the book.
✦ As an immigrant living in the UK, some of the perspectives on people pleasing and communication avoidance (two things I really don't understand!) helped shed a light on this part of British culture that my open and direct self has always struggled to navigate.
✦ I deeply appreciated the author's stories and the perspective they gave me on how different humans respond to deep-seated childhood wounds.
✦ Identity and justice section was *chef’s kiss*. I particularly loved the examples of how other people’s reactions can cause harm to the affected party. I’ve been advocating against a lot of these performative and insulting facades of allyship in workplaces and it was beautiful how the author broke down typical reactions and why they were harmful. I loved the exploration of intersectional identities and privilege!
✦ As a human who is voluntarily not in paid work because of job-related trauma and burnout, I felt so seen in the stress section, particularly the impacts of long term burnout and unhelpful thinking patterns. I like the emphasis that “burnout isn’t a badge of honour” and encouragement to redefine “laziness” and why rest is so important, the antidote to toxic productivity and exhaustion.
✦ I’m not on social media and don’t care about celebrity culture so huge chunks of the self esteem and body image sections didn’t resonate with me. This did, however, validate my choices to eschew these particular parts of modern culture! I feel like some of the commentary is helpful for social media users who need to be reminded of the harm it causes and the distorted versions of life it perpetuates.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
✧ I struggled with how heavily Freudian this was at times and leaning into pseudoscience (like dream interpretation). While I can see how exploring dreams, acknowledging an inner child, considering ego, can be used as tools to help people on their healing journeys, the scientist in me felt let down by the emphasis that was given in some of these sections. It also felt contradictory (and exhausting!) that I have an inner child, inner parent, inner Batman, inner Bruce Wayne, real self, fake self, shadow, etc.
✧ Didn’t love the religion; religion is the root of pretty much every painful instance of my childhood and some of the trauma I carried into adulthood.
✧ While there were a range of experts mentioned throughout the sections, some had more weight than others. Particularly, I noticed the amount of “influencers/content creators” consulted in this book which deeply dampened the credibility for me in these areas, especially when the ‘influencer’ status was the reason they were consulted.
✧ At times, I struggled with the suggested boundaries verbiage and conversation starters: sometimes they felt stilted, formal, watered down, or almost passive aggressive. This might be my North Americanness but I really don’t think, in some instances, kindness should be a consideration when setting boundaries. Drawing on an example from the book: If family is hounding you about when you’re having a kid, “Asking about my sex life is rude and inappropriate. Please don’t ask me this again.” Certainly a human enforcing boundaries around sex, consent, and physical touch should never worry about being “unkind”.
✧ There were a LOT of celebrity and pop culture references that I didn’t understand or weren’t familiar with. Additionally, there's a lot of trendy slang that may not age well.

All that to say, this book is a magnificent primer on all things healing and self-love. It provides interesting thought experiments, exercises, and thinking points to help us on our healing journeys while giving us the language to dive deeper into areas we may want to focus on. While there were areas I found more applicable and interesting than others, I think I felt every emotion known to humankind while reading this book which told me something in itself. Using this book as a tool to start/deepen self-work and understand more about a therapy journey makes healing and stewarding brain health accessible to all and helps normalize conversations in a way that can truly benefit our individual and collective selves. One to read, re-read, and annotate when I get a physical copy.

I’m deeply appreciative of Octopus Audio for making this audiobook available to review on NetGalley - thank you! 🐙✨

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Real Talk by Tasha Bailey is an interesting form of self-therapy on healing.
This is not a book you start and finish, this is a guided therapy session that you can complete in your peace and time.
Over the years I read or listened to many self-help books, finished intense therapy and kind of thought I knew more or less all the things but I am telling you - this book is different!
I started this as an e-book but after screenshotting nearly every page I ordered a hardcover as I can see how this will be used in our family!
What is unique in my opinion that you can use this book for yourself to deal with inner demons, and to understand why you feeling how you feeling, but if you are like me, and you already dealt with all this - you can read this book as a parent to ensure you saving your children's future mental health!

This book is not just informative, it's so easy to read and understand as examples are presented in such a basic way through the characters we all know!
And there are practical parts where you can sit down and do some work!

For practical reasons, I would advise having this book as a physical copy.

Originally I applied to listen to an audiobook narrated by the author but I didn't download it on time (I thought I did but the book just wasn't there anymore) so I bought an e-book to complete the review and I ended up buying a hardcover as well! So I am happy that I lost the audiobook as I believe it would have been harder to listen and complete practical tasks, or see tables with information.

I read Real Talk as an audiobook and gave it 4.5 stars. Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for allowing me to read this. When I first saw this I was super intrigued and really excited to see what Tasha had to say and I'm very glad that i did read this. I really enjoyed and loved this book, there was so much important information for me that I will definitely take into account moving forward, and also a lot of steps and techniques to try out which I loved. And even though there is a lot of information, it is broken up nicely into sections and that definitely helped me to process the information that was helpful to me. I've read quite a few self help books and books that talk about trauma and therapy but this is one of my favourites and I think I will be buying the physical copy. One of my favourite things in Real Talk was how intersectionality was spoken about in the book. This for me was very important, as while in some books it's mentioned here and there, Tasha speaks about it openly and the importance of it. Overall I would recommend this book, particularly the audio as I really enjoyed it.

**Listened to the audiobook**

This book was really interesting. I got a lot from it. I loved that the books author Tasha Bailey narrated the audiobook.
There were parts of the book that were more like 'common sense' - but when in this context you really do listen and pay attention.
I think a couple of listens is needed to fully get the most from it as there is A LOT of info fired at you.
I also liked the fact that there were journal prompts with each section - it felt interactive.

A down-to-earth, friendly, inclusive self help book.

An unexpected one for me, not my regular genre, but I throughly enjoyed this. I read something similar-ish, as part of a book tour around 2 years ago again not planned, and have not come across anything like it since until now.. Really glad I requested this. The sections are clearly thought out and it’s really well narrated. Have recommended to women in my book club