This book would not have been possible if the two of us hadn’t met while Stacey was writing an article about anticipated trauma for US News & World Report and interviewed Lise. Realizing we were kindred spirits in many ways, we kept the conversation going about the emotional inflammation that so many of us are living with these days. The concept for this book arose from a very organic process, from a meeting of two minds with shared sensibilities and desires to help other people. It was made better by the insights of others, including our brilliant literary agent Heather Jackson, who was enthusiastic about this subject from day one and helped us shape the content of this book. Heather, we are incredibly grateful for all your support and wisdom—we couldn’t have created this book without you.
We are also deeply indebted to our talented editor Haven Iverson, who immediately “got” the subject of emotional inflammation and brought warmth, clarity, and compassion to the topic and the process. At Sounds True, we would also like to thank Jade Lascelles, Leslie Brown, Jill Rogers, Chloe Prusiewicz, Wendy Gardner, Matt Jankauskas, Rachael Murray, and Maureen Forys for their invaluable contributions in bringing this book to life.
Of course, we want to thank our families—Jonathan, Aliza, Delaney, and Piera (on Lise’s side); John, Nate, and Nick (on Stacey’s)—for all of their support as we wrote this book. In particular, we want to give a shout-out to Piera, whose incredible paintings inspired the feeling we wanted to capture with the cover of Emotional Inflammation.
We are also grateful to the many people who shared their personal experiences with emotional inflammation and the steps they took to find relief. We hope that giving voice to your fears and anxieties and discovering that you have a great deal of company with your feelings provided a modicum of relief. When you discover that there’s a name for how you’ve been feeling, and that you can take effective actions to restore your emotional equilibrium and change the upstream conditions that fuel your worries, it’s an empowering experience—one that can move you from feeling vulnerable and victimized to strong and resilient. Writing this book has done that for us. We hope that reading it will for you, dear reader.