You are not alone on your healing journey. We all embark on this journey in different ways and with different people. Maybe you’re working with a therapist, you don’t know where to start, or you’re looking for more inspiration. Whatever your reason for being here, there are trauma-healing books available to you to help you out.
When my little sister died in November of 2019, I was launched into a fierce healing journey of my own. I began working intensely with my therapist, reading, taking classes, and putting a lot of new material into practice. And I have made great strides. Not only am I working toward my own healing now, but I am also studying trauma and somatic psychology in hopes of putting it to use someday.
This process is far from over (it likely never will be!) and so I am finding more people, books, and material to help me along. In my own healing process, I have found and fallen in love with many books. Of these titles, I have collected seven that have had the most impact on me and my healing.
Before we dive in, let’s touch on just a couple of things first:
The Land and Trauma
Botanical Revival is all about helping us reconnect to the land in decolonized ways. So what does trauma have to do with it? The answer is everything.
How we treat our bodies is how we treat the land. And if we care about climate change and healing devastated landscapes, that means we have to heal, too. Consumerism, domination, and individuality are the results of fear and scarcity mentalities. When we learn, at a visceral level, that we are safe, we are worthy of having our needs met, and there is an abundance of resources to go around, we naturally tend toward consuming less. Even if you don’t consume much yourself, healing is still a critical first step in effectively engaging in making change. After all, we can’t pour from an empty cup.
This is what happens when we heal: we realize we don’t need as many external things to keep us safe, we have healthier relationships that create healthier communities that are interdependent, we learn to rely on each other versus consumerism to meet our needs, we purchase and support more local goods, we’re more creative and produce high quality and useful materials for our communities, we have more energy to engage in the things we’re passionate about, and so on. If we are going to stop making our planet uninhabitable for ourselves, building this kind of community is the only way forward. And it starts with us.
Starting with Trauma-Healing Books
If you are just starting out, I recommend taking it slow. When we are intending to heal, the last thing we want to do is cause more damage. If we consume too much material at once or make too many changes too quickly, we can easily overwhelm the body. This overwhelm causes us to shut down and resist change–good and bad. So starting slow, following your natural curiosity and capacity, and allowing the lessons from these books to incorporate is the best way.
I also recommend finding and working with a therapist while reading these trauma-healing books. Specifically, I recommend finding a somatic experiencing practitioner or an EMDR therapist. Trauma is a very primal energy that lives in the body. While reading these books, you may find yourself getting triggered or needing help working through what arises. A somatic-based practitioner is best suited to help you process and move through what you learn in these books. You don’t have to do this alone! (And you shouldn’t have to!).
Without further ado, here are my favorite trauma-healing books:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
Trauma does not live in the mind, it lives in the body. For lots of people, talk therapy is very useful, but only up to a certain point. After a couple of years, perhaps, of seeing a talk therapist, we often hit a wall where we no longer feel like we’re making much progress, but we know there’s progress left to make. This is because talking through our problems can only get us so deep, and the roots of our traumas are often much deeper and much more primal than what can be explained in words.
In one of the most popular trauma-healing books available, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., shows us how traumatic events literally reshape the brain and the body. This reshaping often impacts our relationships, ability to learn, trust, self-control, and happiness. And the thing is, practically everyone in the western world has experienced a traumatic event. It can look like being a war veteran, a survivor of sexual assault, an adult child of abusive, neglectful, or alcoholic parents, a member of a community that experienced a mass shooting or a natural disaster, and more. Van Der Kolk also shows us modern advances in trauma psychology and gives us hope for more fulfilling lives.
This book was groundbreaking in the field of psychology when it was first released. Before this book, traumatization and PTSD were mysteries that psychologists bandaged with medication. Although there have been more advancements in somatic psychology since the release of The Body Keeps the Score, this is still a critical book to gain a foundational understanding of what trauma actually is and how we can begin to heal it.
Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine
Have you ever wondered why wild animals rarely show symptoms of PTSD? Even though they live in environments full of predators, extreme weather, and other dangers, they never seem to be traumatized. But humans (in the western world) so often are even though we largely live in safer environments. Why is that?
Peter Levine PhD., in his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, explains exactly why. In the wild, when an animal experiences a traumatic event, they perform a series of rituals to discharge the excess energy once they are safe again.
They run, they sing, they scream, they shake, and they even dance sometimes. And that’s the thing about trauma–when an animal successfully releases that energy after the event has passed, they don’t become traumatized.
In this book, Levine explains how, in the modern western world, we have largely gotten rid of all of the ways we used to discharge that energy. For a long time in the United States, many traditional forms of dancing, chanting, and singing were not just unpopular, but illegal. Think of the Maori Haka ceremonial performances, Native American powwow dancing, and chanting associated with many eastern spiritual traditions. In this book, you will learn about the biology of trauma and some ways to begin reintroducing healing practices.
Peter Levine is known as one of the fathers of somatic psychology and somatic experiencing therapy. He is the founder of the Ergos Institute of Somatic Experiencing, a somatic experiencing teacher and practitioner, and the author of many trauma-healing books.
The Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson
We have all experienced abandonment in one form or another. Many of us grew up with absent, distant, alcoholic, or narcissistic parents. When we grow up with parents who are unable to show up for us and meet our emotional needs, we develop what is called the abandonment wound. This wound makes us believe that we are unworthy of love and secure relationships and it triggers us to develop harmful relationship patterns.
Abandonment wounds can be caused or triggered by many situations besides having emotionally unavailable parents. Our abandonment wounds can be related to break-ups, the end of friendships, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, and self-sabotage through lack of self-care, boundaries, and procrastination. Even growing up in a culture of white individualism can induce this form of trauma.
I was first introduced to Susan Anderson, licensed therapist, through Sheleana Aiyana’s Youtube channel. In Aiyana’s interview with Anderson, she goes into detail about healing our abandonment wounds and learning to be whole in ourselves. Watching this video was grounding and made me excited about this part of my healing journey. You can watch this amazing interview with Susan Anderson in this YouTube video.
In Anderson’s book, The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Surviving Through and Recovering From the Five Stages of the Loss of Love, she reminds us of our worth. She guides us through feeling and letting go of the pain of abandonment and back to our innate worthiness of love and belonging. Through learning about the nervous system and the biochemistry of abandonment, we learn about ourselves in a deeply healing way.
My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
One of the most radical ways you can participate in aiding in the racial justice movement is by healing yourself. White supremacy lives in our bones and the deep parts of our nervous system–it’s not just about the head. The way white bodies react to Black ones is a primal fight or flight response that has been taught to us by the generations before. And the fear of white bodies is similarly rooted deeply in the bodies of Black people. As white people, until we look at ourselves and heal what is behind the often subconscious racist behavior, we’ll never get to a place of true mending.
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem has changed the racial justice movement. In this book, Menakem looks at the racial justice movement through the lens of somatic psychology and trauma. Not only does Menakem give us a plethora of information about the biology of racial trauma, but he also gives us dozens of exercises to put that information into practice. This is a book you do, not read.
This book is for Black people, white people, police officers, and anyone interested in racial justice and somatic psychology. Not only is this book the best racial justice book I’ve read to date, but it is also one of the most useful trauma-healing books in terms of learning about the biology of trauma.
Resmaa Menakem is a Black somatic therapist, coach, author, teacher, and “somatic abolitionist,” a term he coined. You can hear him in his podcast, Guerilla Musings, and take classes with him through his school, the Cultural Somatics Training and Institute.
Becoming the One by Sheleana Aiyana
As human beings, we literally need others in order to survive (not just thrive). We are hardwired to need a community of people around us, especially as children. However, in modern western society, we are taught that our romantic partners are the most important relationships we can have. Not only this, but we are taught this notion of “the one” where there will be one perfect person for us to spend the rest of our lives with, who’ll meet all of our needs, and we’ll live happily ever after. Not only is this not true, but it’s also incredibly harmful to our mental health and the rest of our relationships.
In Sheleana Aiyana’s book, Becoming the One: Heal your Past, Transform your Relationship Patterns, and Come Home to Yourself, she helps us deconstruct that narrative. She shows us how the idea of “the one” can send us chasing after unavailable love, repel us from vulnerability, and keep us feeling isolated and alone. In this book, you’ll learn how to become deeply connected to yourself. You’ll learn about boundaries, your needs, your inner child, and more. That way, you can heal all of your relationships and call in the love you deserve.
I first began working with Sheleana Aiyana in 2020. In fact, I joined her Becoming the One program shortly after my little sister died and it was my first leap into deep healing. I can attest that her work is profoundly moving. Not only is she an author, but she is a spiritual business and relationship mentor through her business, Rising Woman.
You are the Medicine by Asha Frost
I have had the special opportunity to take classes with Asha Frost, and I can personally say that she is one of the most powerful people to work with. Frost is an Ojibwe medicine woman from the Crane Clan. She works with many people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, helping us reconnect to our own unlimited potential to heal. Through classes, one-on-one mentorship, group memberships, and a medicine library available on her website, she helps others reconnect to their power. In her work, she guides you to reconnect with your ancestors, spirit, and your highest self through Indigenous knowledge.
In You Are the Medicine: 13 Moons of Indigenous Wisdom, Ancestral Connection, and Animal Spirit Guidance, Frost walks you through the core of her medicine practices. Learn how to ground yourself, practice resting, return to ancestral ways of cleansing, surrender to the process, find security, connection, bravery, and worthiness inside yourself, and more.
Because we are looking at trauma healing through the lens of healing the land via healing ourselves, learning from Indigenous healers, land protectors, and knowledge keepers is critical. And acknowledging spirituality’s place in both healing and environmentalism is crucial for both. White colonizers have used Indigenous spirituality as a reason to discredit what Native peoples know since the beginning of colonization. And through demonizing Indigenous spirituality, colonizers and capitalists have been able to effectively disconnect us from the land, from ourselves, and from each other.
So even if you are not a spiritual person, it is important to understand spirituality’s role in healing–both ourselves and the planet. And Frost’s enchanting writing is my favorite way to better understand it.
It Didn’t Start with You by Mark Wolynn
Trauma isn’t a one-time thing. Science now understands that trauma is generational and passed down from parent or grandparent to child. A traumatic event that happened to our grandparents, even if forgotten or silenced, is likely still weighing on us today.
In It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, author, teacher, and founder of the Family Constellation Institute Mark Wolynn writes about this phenomenon.
He explains how this trauma is passed down through genetics, epigenetics, behavior, and language to shape our personalities. Even if we don’t know the stories of these events (and may never know them) we can feel their effects in our day-to-day lives.
Wolynn has created what he calls the Core Language Approach, which he uses to follow the breadcrumbs of these forgotten stories so we can release and heal them. Using this approach, we can find the language and behavior patterns, both in us and our family members, that point to certain traumas stuck in our systems. When we find these old traumas, we can then feel and work through them using somatic experience techniques.
Not only does this book help us to reconnect and heal ourselves, but it helps us to reconnect with our family history in a healthy way and to protect future generations from inheriting these traumas, too.
Conclusion: Trauma-Healing and Books
Wherever you are in your healing journey, there are trauma-healing books for you. There are books for personal healing, relational healing, cultural healing, intergenerational healing, and more. Remember, healing takes time and it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Go slow by starting in one place and take your time working through it. I also really recommend finding a therapist, especially a somatic-based therapist, to help you through this material, too.
Although these are my top recommendations for trauma-healing books, I have loads more. You can find these titles by checking out by Bookshop page. I’ve collected all of these titles in one place for you to find.
Have you read any of these books? I would love to hear your thoughts on them and how they’ve impacted you. If you have thoughts or more suggestions for trauma-healing books, leave a comment down below.
Thanks for coming by and happy healing.
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