Mental Trauma

The simple truth is that PTSD can be extremely debilitating - not just for the person who has experienced trauma firsthand, but for their partners, as well. And while there are many books written for those suffering from PTSD, there are few written for the people who love them. In Loving Someone with PTSD, renowned trauma expert Aphrodite Matsakis presents concrete skills and strategies for the partners of those with PTSD.

Hope and light are on the horizon to help clients overcome the challenges of healing and releasing the pain of relational trauma. The highly acclaimed Transcending Trauma explores a unique, compassionate, and evidence-based approach to resolving complex and dissociative trauma. In this transformative audiobook, Frank Anderson, MD, masterfully details an IFS path to therapy that allows clients to access their inherent capacity for healing — called self-energy — while also helping them welcome, as opposed to manage, the extreme emotions frequently associated with trauma.

Conventional trauma treatments (talk therapy and medication) simply don't work for many trauma survivors, and now we know why. Researchers have identified the core symptom that drives most other symptoms—neurological dysregulation. It's an injury to your nervous system triggered by abuse and neglect in childhood, and it can profoundly impact your physical health, damage your ability to learn and focus, and hold you back from forming caring relationships. The good news is that healing is possible, and in Re-Regulated, author Anna Runkle (aka the Crappy Childhood Fairy) shows you how.

Learn how to fully return to peace with the transformative healing of Somatic Therapy. Calm your mind & body to start living the life you want yet never thought you could have. In a world where stress, trauma, and emotional wounds can accumulate and manifest as physical and psychological pain, the significance of these techniques cannot be overstated.

In this innovative title, celebrated trainer and trauma practitioner Laura Khoudari brings a fresh approach to healing after trauma, using strength training as an embodied movement practice. Compassionate, witty, and fastidiously researched, Khoudari's debut, Lifting Heavy Things, is a breakthrough title that will empower and inspire you to develop resilience and build emotional and physical strength through working out with weights, while mindful of the ways that trauma can compromise the wellbeing of the mind and body.

Trauma-Informed Yoga for Survivors of Sexual Assault provides a comprehensive overview of how to offer yoga to survivors of sexual assault in a safe, effective, evidence-based, and healing way. Zahabiyah A. Yamasaki, founder of Transcending Sexual Trauma through Yoga, draws on the framework of trauma-informed care and trauma-informed yoga program development and curriculum, while also weaving in personal narrative and inspiring survivor stories.

In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

In the aftermath of stress, disappointment, and trauma, people often fall into survival mode, even while a part of them longs for more. Juggling multiple demands and responsibilities keeps them busy, but not healed. As a survivor of sexual assault, racism, and evacuation from a civil war in Liberia, Dr. Thema Bryant knows intimately the work involved in healing. Having made the journey herself, in addition to guiding others as a clinical psychologist and ordained minister, Dr. Thema shows you how to reconnect with your authentic self and reclaim your time, your voice, your life.

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors - and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact.

Experienced clinician Sebern Fisher keenly demonstrates neurofeedback’s profound ability to help treat one of the most intractable mental health concerns of our time: severe childhood abuse, neglect, or abandonment, otherwise known as developmental trauma. A mix of fundamental theory and nuts-and-bolts practice, the audiobook delivers a carefully articulated and accessible look at the mind and brain in developmental trauma, what a “trauma identity” looks like, and how neurofeedback can be used to retrain the brain, thereby fostering a healthier, more stable state of mind.

Trauma can result not only from catastrophic events such as abuse, violence, or loss of loved ones, but from natural disasters and everyday incidents like auto accidents, medical procedures, divorce, or even falling off a bicycle. At the core of this book is the understanding of how trauma is imprinted on the body, brain, and spirit—often resulting in anxiety, nightmares, depression, physical illnesses, addictions, hyperactivity, and aggression.

Have you noticed that no matter how much time you spend in talk therapy, you still feel anxious and triggered? That is because talk therapy can keep you stuck in a pattern of reliving your stories, rather than moving beyond them. But, most of all, it’s because trauma doesn’t just reside inside your mind. Much more importantly, it locks itself in other parts of your body. When left unresolved, that trauma continues to live there, impacting your life, your relationships, your sense of safety, and your ability to experience joy in very real ways.

In this audiobook, Dr Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress. Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma - which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.

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 retelling 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.

An essential work that centers colonial and historical trauma in a framework for healing, Decolonizing Therapy illuminates that all therapy is—and always has been—inherently political. To better understand the mental health oppression and institutional violence that exists today, we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices. Only then will listeners see how colonial, historical, and intergenerational legacies have always played a role in the treatment of mental health.

Gretchen Schmelzer watched too many people quit during treatment for trauma recovery. They found it too difficult or too frightening or just decided that for them it was too late. But as a therapist and trauma survivor herself, Dr. Schmelzer wants us to know that it is never too late to heal from trauma, whether it is the suffering caused within an abusive relationship or PTSD resulting from combat.

If you've experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, your past trauma could affect how you care for yourself today. You may struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings, and reach for food to soothe your emotions when feeling sad, anxious, or stressed. You aren't alone. Healing Emotional Eating for Trauma Survivors offers an innovative, trauma-informed approach to overcoming emotional eating using the principles of mindfulness, self-compassion, and neuroscience.

Step 1: You admit that you're powerless over your addiction. Now what? Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) have helped countless people on the path to recovery. But many still feel that 12-step programs aren't for them: that the spiritual emphasis is too narrow, the modality too old-school, the setting too triggering, or the space too exclusive. Some struggle with an addict label that can eclipse the histories, traumas, and experiences that feed into addiction, or dismisses the effects of adverse experiences like trauma in the first place.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

Growing up in a home where there is addiction or relationship trauma puts a child at great risk for long-term, post-traumatic stress effects that adversely compromise adult relationships. Best-selling author, psychologist, and psychodramatist Tian Dayton examines this trauma through an exploration of the way the brain and body process frightening or painful emotions and experiences in childhood.