Trauma Memoir

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Paul Scheer has entertained countless fans and podcast listeners with stories about the odd, wild, and absurd details of his life. Yet these tales have pointed to deeper, more difficult truths that the actor and comedian has kept to himself. Now, he is finally ready to share those truths for the first time—but, of course, with a healthy dose of humor.

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

A book for psychotherapists and their clients — and for anyone who wants to make the journey from shame to unshame. Carolyn Spring, author of ‘Recovery is my best revenge: my experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder’, documents in this, her second book, her journey through psychotherapy to heal and resolve trauma-based shame, which had resulted in a catastrophic mental breakdown in her early thirties and an eventual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).

October 2021. Whitney Lyn Allen’s happiness came screeching to a standstill. Stunned by her husband Ryan's rare allergic reaction to a bee sting, the 35-year-old felt hopeless after Ryan succumbed to irreversible brain damage. With his unexpected death leaving a massive gap in their close-knit family, she feared she would never be enough to raise their two young boys.

Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat pairings: Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

The man who should have been there to help protect me, love me, and teach me about life did the opposite. I was told to keep quiet and not tell anyone our secret. A secret that filled me with fear and shame. I was sexually abused from ages five to twelve.

Sexual trauma can dim or even extinguish the spark of our personalities—but deep within us, our souls remain as bright and beautiful as the day God gave them to us. Little Sweetheart, the true account of a twelve-year-old girl trapped in a sexual relationship with an older dance teacher, is much more than a memoir. With vulnerability and honesty, Amber Gregory integrates both spiritual inspiration and careful research with her autobiographical story. As she shares her healing journey—a journey she took with her Divine Soul Mate at her side—she empowers us to learn along with her. She ...

What if emotional abuse is so hidden that its effects remain unchallenged for decades, masquerading as personal failings? Believing Me is an emotionally gripping memoir that gives language to the hidden and ineffable nature of childhood trauma and how it can imprint on a person, resulting in fractured self-esteem, addictions, perfectionism, and a string of abusive relationships.

Dana Trent is only a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana’s mother, the Lady, a cold and self-absorbed woman whose personality disorders rule the home, guards large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer. But when the Lady impulsively plucks Dana from the Midwest and moves the two of them south, their fresh start results in homelessness and bankruptcy.

Written by Gabriel Walker Land and Al Khemis, a grand introduction to Thailand! Thailand is known as the 'Land of Smiles' -- however it's not always an easy place to land as a long-term expat. In this memoir and self-help story, a digital nomad, expatriate and economic refugee finds himself in a foreign land where he is forced to unlock the endless mysteries of Asia. Along the way, our wayward traveler begins to smile with genuine happiness for the first time in his life, and he soon realizes that if he had never journeyed to the ASEAN region, he might not still be alive to write these ...

A searing memoir about growing up in a fiercely loving, abusive rabbinical family in which the author's father, the charismatic head of a splinter Orthodox religious community, demands unswerving loyalty—and a commitment to guarding terrible secrets. Sara Sherbill was raised by a father who was both a representative of God and a broken man harboring an intricate set of secrets. Her riveting story explores what happens when a daughter is tasked with keeping those secrets, and the cost of keeping them. It asks: How do we live with suffering? What does it mean to heal?

Set against a 20-year dialogue with her mother, Barbara, who suffers from long undiagnosed PTSD, author Elizabeth Wilcox opens her maternal history with the birth of her illegitimate grandmother Violet to a German house servant outside London in 1904. With her mother's encouragement, Wilcox goes on to trace the lives of Violet and her mother, Barbara, both of whom are deeply impacted by maternal separation and the complex trauma they have endured because of war.

On May 12, 2015, Amtrak 188 derailed outside of Philadelphia going 106 miles per hour. Geralyn Ritter was thrown from the train with such force that she sustained catastrophic injuries to her chest, her abdomen, and her pelvis. Found unconscious, unable to breathe, and suffering massive blood loss, she was not expected to survive. After enduring weeks in the ICU, dozens of surgeries over the following years, unremitting pain, PTSD, depression, and opioid dependence, Geralyn was faced with a daunting question: Beyond mere survival after trauma, where is the path back to joy?

Mark Johnson’s third memoir chronicles an ironic year of surprise and transformation when one man’s life takes an unexpected detour and he discovers his destiny on the way to a new destination.As the story begins, Mark is poised for a new adventure. He has already navigated the ups and downs of his St. Louis childhood and retraced the path of his mother’s life from fertile ground. Yet, he doesn’t expect his journey with his husband Tom—selling their steady-but-often-snowy Illinois home and resurfacing in the warmth and serenity of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert—will prove to be as ...