Books on Healing from Trauma | Explore Approaches with Bukuru

A GUIDE TO SELECTING

Books About Overcoming Trauma

Ways to recondition the mind and body after negative high-impact experiences

Trauma is perhaps the most challenging issue to solve with books.

There are many protocols that contain roughly the same elements but with a different order or focus. Common elements are:

Exposure to discomfort
Calming the nervous system
Falsifying conditioned beliefs
Discharge of bodily-stored tension from past experiences
Acknowledging and letting go of compensatory behavioral habits
Breaking free from focusing attention on potential threats
Learning to trust others and connect
Acceptance

Some protocols have very specific elements, such as:

Severing of connections with past lives, ancestors or even non-human entities
Eye movement to simultaneous stimulate both hemispheres of the brain
Putting you in a trance state to work directly with the subconscious mind
Expression, either creative or symbolic
Changing your perception of self, others, existence and any experience
Feedback tools for learning to access calm brain wave states

Trauma is a hot topic and some authors in this field have achieved pop-star status in recent years. If you look at their books, they’re largely advertorials for a certain protocol, some even with a trademarked name.

None of the protocols have produced such good results that it have made the others obsolete. It seems to be very personal which of the elements one needs in which order and to what extent.

There are always trade-offs between potential benefits and possible risks:

A focus on releasing tension in the body often begins by bringing the nervous system into a calm state through e.g. body and breath awareness, but this state can be very unstable if there are strong false beliefs about safety that retrigger your nervous system in one of the fight-flight-freeze-fawn-flop responses.
On the other hand, a focus on beliefs could leave you stuck in the mind, trying to experience what you logically know to be true, without improving your quality of life.
Subconscious practices might be useful to bypass the critical factor of the mind, but it might also leave tension in the body unprocessed.
Symbolic practices, like family systems, may help to confront certain repressed memories that are too difficult to contront directly, but there is also the risk of creating new, false memories.
Direct exposure is often an essential element, but when not done with the right intensity or safety measures, it carries the risk of retraumatization or dissociation.
Practices revolving around acceptance of your limitations can be very liberating when someone is stuck in the process of trying to attain an unrealistic goal with therapy, but it can also be used as a tool to avoid the discomfort of facing certain aspects of reality one doesn't like.

Like in any marketplace, practitioners of one therapy tend to misrepresent the others in a black or white manner. The body-focused practitioners often involve some kind of cognitive processing just as the mind-focused practitioners often pay attention to their client’s sense of safety.

Overcoming trauma is not easy. Neither is finding a practitioner with enough attention to help you determine what’s the most suitable approach in your particular situation. Again, it’s a big marketplace with a lot of people willing to pay well for a chance to resolve their trauma.

Before looking at books on trauma, make sure to familiarize yourself with the different types of problems and solutions that exist. For example, there is a difference in treatments of developmental trauma, event-based trauma and inherited trauma.

It also matters if you believe in reincarnation of not, as some therapies don’t stop at your experiences of this lifetime. Similarly, it matters if you consider consciousness from a materialist, a religious, a New Age or a non-dual perspective.

There's also been a lot of debate in recent years about the Poly-Vagal Theory. However, the bottom line seems that there is no hard evidence for the model but that some of the practices that have emerged from PVT seem to work well for some people.

Books can help you to become more familiar with the approaches, but the level of self-help that can be applied to trauma seems somewhat limited compared to other topics. Meditation is certainly a tool that can be useful to be less triggered, as a start. And, for example, a single hypnosis or family constellation session is sometimes what brings about an entire shift. But these are rare cases.

In the field of Positive Psychology, there is something called a Post Peak-Experience Order (PPEO) as opposed to PTSD, which can follow after a traumatic event. Perhaps reading in more detail about different therapies would be the most useful next step.

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood"
~ Milton H. Erickson

Types of Trauma Recovery Books

Here you find a list of archetypal books about trauma recovery from which we captured the essence in a short summary. The books are listed in a random order. We don't earn any commission on your selection.

"Waking the Tiger"

The way Peter Levine proposes to deal with trauma, is by focusing on bodily sensations like how animals discharge tense energy right after the experiences. By doing so stored energy from earlier experiences is released, but also the body relearns how to regulate and the neural pathways that makes us hypervigilant become calibrated into a more useful state. It's based on gradual exposure and mindfulness. Basically, you exposure yourself to discomfort and then return to safety and observe the feelings in your body, again and again.

"It Didn't Start With You"

Mark Wolynn suggests the possibility that trauma originates from family history rather than just earlier events in your own life and also how to break the cycle. It involves identifying negative phrases in your thinking, looking for specific clues that link to your family history and then reconstruct this in words that make you realize your pattern of fearing a past event. Once you see that it's their story and not yours, you become free of it. Also, by shifting your focus to the positive aspects of your family history to create a balanced feeling.

"Anchored" (Polyvagal Theory)

Deb Dana explores how unresolved trauma can leave the nervous system in a state of constant stress – fight, flight, or freeze. She offers exercises (body scan meditations, breathwork, progressive muscle relaxation) to track physical sensations, calm automatic stress responses, and build a sense of bodily security to retrain the nervous system after trauma. This is considered to be one of the most practical and understandable books that build on poly vagal theory.

"Brainspotting"

David Grand argues that when trauma happens, it can overload our brain, leaving bits of the experience unresolved which disrupts proper functioning of the nervous system. By focusing on certain points or a specific internal spot where trauma is stored while revisiting the traumatic experiences as it is explained in the book, we can process these unresolved issues. This protocol is called Brainspotting, which is somewhat similar to EMDR.

"The Body Keeps the Score"

This seminal book by Bessel van der Kolk presents scientific research that suggests elements of EMDR, yoga, mindfulness, positive psychology, neurofeedback and expressive arts for processing traumatic experiences. Van der Kolk's book is considered a trailblazing book for many of the practices he covered in this book. It has been a bestseller for years, and often has a reassuring effect on people looking for a solution that this is possible. However, the practical value of this book is not as great as its popularity might suggest. Nor has Van der Kolk produced notably better results with treatments than other protocols.

Bukuru's Zero-Books Approach

Our suggestion is to start with defining your mental model and then to look in the therapy section which types might suit your mental model. Then, be patient in selecting a therapist. Keep looking for one you really connect with before you commit to anything long term. But when you do find one, do commit long term.

About Bukuru

The core philosophy of Bukuru is that each person should test their own beliefs. The project started as a quest to categorize self-development books in such a way that it would become easier to find books that match your beliefs. However, along the way we concluded that the essence of most books can be captured in a few sentences – if the idea is original at all. Instead of helping people buy books, we now help people not buying books.