The following are books for healing trauma to help you embark on your recovery journey.
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Books For Healing Trauma
1. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
By Bessel van der Kolk
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller.
In this book, you’ll discover the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
2. What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
By Bruce D. Perry , Oprah Winfrey
Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”
It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future – opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way.
Related: Why Is Trauma Therapy So Hard? (+Best Trauma Healing Exercises To Support Your Recovery)
3. Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
By Onno van der Hart , Kathy Steele , Suzette Boon
This training manual for patients who have a trauma-related dissociative disorder offers short educational pieces, homework sheets, and exercises that address ways in which dissociation interferes with essential emotional and life skills, and support inner communication and collaboration with dissociative parts of the personality.
Related: 7 Trauma Release Exercises To Support Your Recovery After Trauma
4. Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma
By Elizabeth A. Stanley
Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, a pioneering researcher, explains the significance of the trauma continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that’s stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.
With stories from men and women Dr. Stanley gives readers hands-on strategies they can use themselves, whether they want to perform under pressure or heal from traumatic experience, while at the same time pointing our understanding in a new direction.
5. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing
By David A. Treleaven
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness explains how we can minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for trauma survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits.
The book illustrates the ways mindfulness can help—or hinder—trauma recovery and offers a groundbreaking and practical approach that empowers those looking to practice mindfulness in a safe, transformative way.
6. Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma
By Staci K. Haines , Traci Odom
This is the first encouraging, sex-positive guide for all women survivors of sexual assault — heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, coupled, and single — who want to reclaim their sex lives.
Healing Sex encourages women to learn how to say “yes” — to their own desires and on their own terms and offers a mind-body approach to healing from sexual trauma.
7. Flying on the Inside: A Memoir of Trauma and Recovery
By Rachel Gotto
This is the remarkable true story of one woman’s journey back from the brink. Newly widowed and faced with a deadly brain tumour, she was given two years to live. She wanted more…
This gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming tragedy and trauma charts one tenacious woman’s incredible fight to find light in the darkest of journeys. It is a life-affirming tale of positivity and hope in the face of the most difficult of human experiences.
Related: Best 10 Proven Ways to Heal From Childhood Trauma Splitting
Workbooks For Healing Trauma
8. Transforming The Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists
By Janina Fisher
Dr. Janina Fisher, international expert on trauma, has spent over 40 years working with survivors, helping them to navigate their journey. In Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, she shows how the legacy of symptoms helped them survive and offers:
- Step-by-step strategies that can be used on their own or in collaboration with a therapist
- Simple diagrams that make sense of the confusing feelings and physical reactions survivors experience
- Worksheets to practice the skills that bring relief and ultimately rejuvenation
Related: Best 15 Inner Child Exercises: How To Connect With Your Inner Child (& Heal Your Childhood Wounds)
9. Life After Trauma: A Workbook for Healing
By Dena Rosenbloom , Mary Beth Williams , Barbara E. Watkins
This supportive workbook helps trauma survivors find and use crucial skills for coping, self-understanding, and self-care.
Filled with comforting activities, relaxation techniques, self-evaluation questionnaires, and exercises, the workbook explains how and why trauma can throw you for a loop and what survivors can do now to cope.
Related: Inner Child Wounds Test (+4 Attachment Imagery Exercises To Heal Inner Child Wounds)
10. Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook
By Erika Shershun
Drawing on the powerful mind-body techniques of somatic therapy, The Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook is a step-by-step guide to overcoming the psychological effects of sexual trauma, and increasing positive body awareness and vitality.
