The best trauma books don’t just tell a story — they help you heal. These must-read trauma books by women highlight raw, powerful journeys. These unforgettable books written by women are bound to stay with you. If you’re looking for trauma books to read that truly resonate, start here.
These remarkable women—researchers, clinicians, medical doctors, professors, journalists, and all authors—have written groundbreaking books that benefit trauma survivors, their loved ones, mental health professionals, and society as a whole.
By contributing their unique perspectives, these women have enriched the mental health field and encourage readers to develop a deeper understanding of trauma and the journey of recovery.
Consider adding these books to your reading list.
Related: Healing Through Literature: 10 Must-Read Books For Complex Trauma Survivors
10 Powerful Trauma Books by Women You Need to Read
1. Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma
When a physical wound is left unhealed, it continues to cause pain and can infect the whole body. When emotions are left unhealed, they similarly cause harm that spreads to other parts of our lives, hurting our family, friends, community members, and others.
Eventually, this hurt can injure an entire lineage, metastasizing across years and generations. This is intergenerational trauma.
From Dr. Mariel Buqué, a leading trauma psychologist, comes this groundbreaking guide to transforming intergenerational pain into intergenerational abundance. With Break the Cycle, she delivers the definitive guide to healing inherited trauma.
Weaving together scientific research with practical exercises and stories from the therapy room, Dr. Buqué teaches readers how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next.
And how they can break the cycle through tangible therapeutic practices, learning to pass down strength instead of pain to future generations.
2. It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People
It’s not always easy to tell when you’re dealing with a narcissistic person.
One day they draw you in with their charm and charisma, the next they gaslight you, wreck your self-esteem, and leave you wondering, “what should I have done differently?” As Dr. Ramani explains in It’s Not You, the answer is: absolutely nothing.
Just as a tiger can’t change its stripes, a narcissist will not stop manipulating and invalidating you, no matter how much you try to appease them.
The first step toward healing from their toxic influence—and to protect yourself from future harm—is to accept that you are not to blame for their behavior.
Drawing on more than two decades of studying the landscape of narcissism and working with survivors, Dr. Ramani explores how narcissists hijack our well-being and offers a healing path forward.
Unpacking the oft-misunderstood personality, she reveals the telltale behavioral patterns that indicate you may be dealing with a narcissist.
Along the way, you’ll learn how to become gaslight resistant, chip away at the trauma bonds that keep you stuck in the cycle, grieve the loss of these painful relationships, create and maintain realistic boundaries, discern unhelpful behaviors from narcissistic behaviors, and recover your sense of self after constant invalidation.
3. Transforming The Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists
Traumatic experiences leave a “living legacy” of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that re-telling the story of what happened would resolve these effects.
However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma.
To transform traumatic experiences, survivors need to understand their symptoms and reactions as normal responses to abnormal events. They need ways to work with the symptoms that intrude on their daily activities, preventing a life beyond trauma.
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:
- Worksheets to practice the skills that bring relief and ultimately rejuvenation.
- 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.
Related: 16 Must-Read Psychoanalysis Books: Excavate The Mysteries Of Human Consciousness
4. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment.
You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior.
These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life.
In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable.
You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment.
Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life.
Discover the four types of difficult parents:
- The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety.
- The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone.
- The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting.
- The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory.
5. Breaking the Cycle: the 6 Stages of Healing from Childhood Family Trauma: Support and Recovery for What You Were Once Powerless to Change
Most of us are only starting to become aware of how our foundational years contribute to who we are today. Our childhood environment shapes the foundation for our sense of self, how we feel about the world, and how we relate to others.
If we experienced trauma or dysfunction along the way, it likely disrupted the pathways to these fundamental structures.
Understanding our trauma is not about blame, but about understanding, learning, and growing. In most cases, our caregivers did the best they could with the tools they had, often while dealing with external or internal stressors as well.
With the world’s increasing understanding of trauma, this paves the way for understanding and growth.
Survivors of childhood family trauma typically go through 6 stages in their path to healing: pre-awareness, uncovering, digging in, healing, understanding, and nurturing.
Using elements from her clinical work, as well as personal experience, Gillis provides support and tips for survivors navigating these 6 stages.
No matter where you are in your journey — only just uncovering, becoming more aware, or supporting a loved one in their process —this book will help.
6. You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms
Feeling pressured to forgive their offenders is a common reason trauma survivors avoid mental health services and support. Those who force, pressure, or encourage trauma survivors to forgive can unknowingly cause harm and sabotage their recovery.
And such harm is entirely unnecessary–especially when research shows there is no consensus among psychologists, psychiatrists, and other professionals about whether forgiveness is necessary for recovery at all.
You Don’t Need to Forgive is an invaluable resource for trauma survivors and their clinicians who feel alienated and even gaslighted by the toxic positivity and moralism that often characterizes attitudes about forgiveness in psychology and self-help.
Bringing together research and testimony from psychologists, psychotherapists, criminologists, philosophers, religious leaders, and trauma survivors, psychotherapist and expert in complex trauma recovery Amanda Ann Gregory explores the benefits of elective forgiveness and the dangers of required forgiveness.
Elective forgiveness gives survivors the agency to progress in their recovery on their own terms. Forgiveness is helpful for some, but it is not universally necessary for recovery; each person should have the power to choose.
Related: 20 Common Personality Traits Of Family Trauma Survivors
7. The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children.
But it was Diego—a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault—who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.
The stunning news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce.
Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime.
For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the fascinating scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent vitally important hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come.
8. Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice
The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse.
The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them.
Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair, she commits the radical act of listening to survivors.
Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.
Deeply researched and compassionately told, Truth and Repair envisions a new path to justice for all.
9. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal
Your biography becomes your biology. The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults, but it also affects our physical health, longevity, and overall well-being.
Scientists now know on a bio-chemical level exactly how parents’ chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical “fingerprints” on our brains.
When children encounter sudden or chronic adversity, stress hormones cause powerful changes in the body, altering the body’s chemistry.
The developing immune system and brain react to this chemical barrage by permanently resetting children’s stress response to “high,” which in turn can have a devastating impact on their mental and physical health as they grow up.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa shares stories from people who have recognized and overcome their adverse experiences, shows why some children are more immune to stress than others, and explains why women are at particular risk.
Related: 8 Brilliant Fiction Books About Mental Illness
10. The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole
Those affected by complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, commonly feel as though there is something fundamentally wrong with them―that somewhere inside there is a part of them that needs to be fixed.
Facing one’s PTSD is a brave, courageous act―and with the right guidance, recovery is possible.
In The Complex PTSD Workbook, you’ll learn all about C-PTSD and gain valuable insight into the types of symptoms associated with unresolved childhood trauma.
Take healing into your own hands while applying strategies to help integrate positive beliefs and behaviors.
Discover your path to recovery with:
- Examples and exercises―Uncover your own instances of trauma with PTSD activities designed to teach you positive strategies.
- Expert guidance―Explore common PTSD diagnoses and common methods of PTSD therapy including somatic therapy, CBT, and mind-body perspectives.
- Prompts and reflections―Apply the strategies you’ve learned and identify PTSD symptoms with insightful writing prompts.
Find the tools you need to work through C-PTSD and regain emotional control with this mind-body workbook.
All books are listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name and descriptions are provided by Amazon.com.
BONUS!
You Don’t Need To Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms by Amanda Ann Gregory
You Don’t Need to Forgive is an invaluable resource for trauma survivors and their clinicians who feel alienated and even gaslighted by the toxic positivity and moralism that often characterizes attitudes about forgiveness in psychology and self-help.
Bringing together research and testimony from psychologists, psychotherapists, criminologists, philosophers, religious leaders, and trauma survivors, psychotherapist and expert in complex trauma recovery I explores the benefits of elective forgiveness and the dangers of required forgiveness.
Elective forgiveness gives survivors the agency to progress in their recovery on their own terms. Forgiveness is helpful for some, but it is not universally necessary for recovery; each person should have the power to choose.
Purchase You Don’t Need to Forgive
Written By Amanda Ann Gregory
Originally Appeared On Amanda Ann Gregory
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