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Something to Hold Onto: Simple Metaphors, Images and Practical Tools to Transform Your Life
Kate Robson
Simon & Schuster Canada (2026)
Sometimes the right book arrives at exactly the right time. Kate Robson’s Something to Hold Onto: Metaphors, Images and Practical Tools to Transform Your Life crossed my desk at the perfect moment. Robson’s book draws from her expertise as a psychotherapist supporting people through loss and transition. Like a gentle friend, it offers readers a range of practical, accessible tools intended to help navigate and contend with change. It is an open invitation to examine our beliefs and behaviours with curiosity and compassion.
As wellness slop and pop optimizers continue to flood the zeitgeist, Something to Hold Onto is refreshing for its integrity and grounded approach.
People who have grown tired of self-help served by social media algorithms will find a useful, very human companion in Robson’s book. Its short chapters are generous, accessible, and ideal for anyone who might find it difficult to concentrate in the midst of chaos and trauma.
Designed to be read either chronologically or out of order, the book offers simple visualization prompts that facilitate more expansive discussions of growth, connection and rest. Readers are invited to systematically examine their experiences with openness as well as a sense of agency. The result is a collection of strategies for coping with hardship grounded in a range of therapeutic modalities, and a methodology to help things become immediately more bearable.
Going outside before 10 a.m. for at least 10 minutes every day, for example, can be a workable place to start. It might make things even two per cent better. “When you’re carrying such a heavy emotional load, two per cent matters,” Robson notes. In another chapter, she invites readers to imagine a string of metaphorical lights, and how they might signify a series of events or moments to look forward to across a given calendar month.
By drawing readers’ attention to seemingly small things — good food, a gentle walk, a moment of simple delight — Robson builds momentum towards deeper and more lasting change.
Her essays on joy offer helpful reflections on the interplay between society, culture and the self. “It feels so bitterly ironic that other people’s inability to love themselves may be what blocks us from loving ourselves,” she writes.
“Our culture makes it hard to even talk about this. Any concept or act related to love or care for the self swiftly becomes commodified or ridiculed or diminished in some way. We feel absurd and vulnerable and foolish when we try to keep the promises we make to ourselves or speak to ourselves in a loving way.”
Robson admits that she didn’t start writing this book for two years because she was afraid. Her humility is honest but also instructive; it invites readers to hold her experiences, and by extension our own, with a kind of care rooted in empathy, not quick fixes.
“When I worked in the NICU, I sometimes cringed when people would tell the parents of a sick baby that they needed to re-frame their thoughts or face their fears,” she writes.
“I wondered if they would be so quick to say that to someone lying by the side of the road after a car accident or to a person standing on the sidewalk watching their house burn down.” ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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