My Book Is Out! Who Is It For?

Hi, my name is Martha Kauppi. I’m an AASECT-certified sex therapist and supervisor. Welcome to my vlog. I am here today to give you some really exciting news. At least, I’m really excited about it. My book has come out! I wrote a book called Polyamory: A Clinical Toolkit for Therapists (and Their Clients) and I’m very excited. I’m super excited. Who isn’t excited when they have a book come out?

It’s amazing to hold this thing in my hands. It’s incredible, it’s heavy, it’s smooth, it’s beautiful, it’s print is beautiful. Everything about it is beautiful. I’m very excited. It has amazing endorsements from very highly respected people on the back.

This is a big, big moment for me and I’m excited to share it with you. The official release date for my book is May 15, but some people are receiving their copies sooner. They must be a little ahead of schedule with shipping. Everybody who got a review copy has it and some people who have pre-ordered it have received it as well, including a student of mine in India. It’s very, very, very exciting.

If you want a copy of my book, go get one. You can get it at my local, independent bookseller, A Room of One’s Own. They’re not doing in-person business but you can order it through them online. I have the link below. You can order it from Amazon, you can order it internationally, and you can order it from the publisher, Rowman and Littlefield. I hope you’ll order it if you’re interested in it.

I want to tell you a little bit about it. “Who is my book for?” is the question that I really want to tackle today. I wrote this book for therapists—a clinical toolkit for therapists—but I also wrote the book for clients, and I also think it’s really applicable to anybody who’s really interested in how relationships work and personal growth.

Let me explain. Therapists need a good book about polyamory because there isn’t one. This is really 492 pages worth of textbook. If you’ve ever taken a class from me about polyamory or about anything else, you know that I’m really interested in making sure that you take away something from everything that I do that you can actually apply. When I teach therapists, I want those therapists in the class to have something they can take to their very next session. When I’m talking to members of the public who are not therapists, I really want you to have something you can apply in your relationship or that you can use to understand yourself better, or your partner, or partners better.

I have a very “boots on the ground” teaching style. Always have. It’s annoying to me to sit through a class and then take away ideas, but no skills. I just love those skills. This book is jam packed with skills, including a whole bunch of worksheets. These are the exact same skills I use in my life when I need to have a tough conversation, I need to figure out what I think about something, trying to solve a problem, trying to generate ideas about how to move forward, trying to understand a perspective that’s really different from my own, or how to handle tough emotions. I’ve developed, over my lifetime, lots of skills for how to do that. There’s stuff for how to handle all of that in this book.

That’s very relevant to therapists, but it’s also very relevant to their clients. Not everybody who wants to open their relationship can find a good therapist to help them who’s really competent to work with open relationships. If that describes you, this book is for you, too. I think if you’re pretty insightful, have a good attention span, you can really get a lot out of this book that you could apply to your own relationship.

Even if you’re not in a relationship—this is a very interesting thing about writing this book—it wasn’t really possible, it turned out, for me to write a book about how to work with tough situations with polyamory and how to help people in open relationships make their open relationship really work beautifully without doing a pretty deep dive into what it takes to make any relationship work beautifully.

If you’re just interested in relationships or you’re interested in making your own relationship work better, you can’t read a book like this without learning some stuff about polyamory, but let me tell you: it is seriously about how to handle relationship challenges generally. If you’re pretty open-minded and can live with reading a book about polyamory and figuring out how it applies to your own monogamous relationship, I think you’ll like it.

When you think about it, people in open relationships have been doing that with monogamous-focused self-help books for a long time. This is like that, but it doesn’t marginalize anybody in any kind of relationship style, including monogamous. That’s why I wrote this book for three audiences! That’s crazy, right?

I’ll be super excited to hear your thoughts about the book. Any feedback you have for me, put them in the comments. Send me an email. I’ll be happy to record another vlog addressing your questions or I’ll write a blog post.

Thank you for listening! In my next video, I’m going to talk about why the heck I wrote a book about polyamory in the first place. Talk to you soon.

Available On: Amazon, Independent Seller, Rowman.com, International: Blackwells, Waterstones, UK Bookshop