Reading Lists for Emotional Wellness: Books for Healing Childhood Trauma
Wherever you are on your healing journey, this curated reading list of books for healing childhood trauma offers resources for hope and renewal.
A reading list of books for healing childhood trauma
I put together this list of books about healing childhood trauma based on my own experiences with healing from my childhood. The books on this reading list cover the science of trauma, how it impacts the brain, body, nervous system, and our relationship with ourselves and others. These books also provide various roadmaps and supports for healing childhood trauma. The insights in these books have formed important stepping stones on my own healing journey, and I hope that you find them helpful as well.
#1 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory by Deb Dana, LCSW
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my own childhood trauma healing journey, it’s that healing really is about the nervous system. This understanding has given me patience with the healing process and with myself because I understand that I can’t just force myself to think the “right” thoughts; I have to give my nervous system time and care to heal like I would give time and care to a broken bone.
Anchored is a practical guide to understanding how your nervous system works, how you can learn to tune in to what your nervous system is doing, and how you can work with your nervous system to regulate your emotions. Anchored isn’t explicitly about childhood trauma, but childhood trauma can wreak havoc of the nervous system. Nervous system regulation is something that we’re supposed to learn in childhood from the nervous system of our parents/caregivers, but if your parents didn’t know how to regulate their own nervous system’s this is likely a foundational life lesson you missed out on because of childhood trauma.
The world looks completely different to me now that I understand how my nervous system works. I’m still working on healing my nervous system, but with an understanding of how my nervous system works and some tools to work with my nervous system, I now feel calmer and more connected to my body than I ever have. If you don’t feel physical sensations in your body when you experience an emotion, if your emotions feel confusing or overwhelming, if you can’t physically feel presence and warmth when you’re around other people, or if you know all about what’s wrong but you just don’t know how to fix it, I highly recommend this book.
“When you’re going through a breakdown, a good question to ask is what is actually breaking down. We usually think it’s our self. But what’s typically happening is that our struggle to deny our emotional truth is breaking down. Emotional distress is a signal that it’s getting harder to remain emotionally unconscious. It means we’re about to discover our true selves underneath all that story business.”
-- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
#2 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve overhead someone mention how much this book helped them. This book for healing childhood trauma helps readers understand parents who just aren’t there for you the way you need them to be, the impact this has on you even as an adult, and what you can do to heal and grow beyond this dynamic. What’s really great about this book is that it offers insight into the devastating impacts of childhood emotional neglect and abuse - a painful kind of childhood trauma - that tends to get less discussion in other books about healing from childhood trauma.
I recommend this book if you find the behavior of your parents confusing, if you go back and forth about whether your childhood was really that bad, and if you struggle to figure out if/how your childhood is impacting you as an adult. This book has wonderful insights, but if you would already vehemently agree that your childhood was screwed up and understand why the dynamics of your family of origin were messed up, I’d start with another book on this list.
#3 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - It's Not You, It's What Happened to You: Complex Trauma and Treatment by Christine Courtois, PhD
This is a quick read (just 127 pages), but it’s a great introduction to complex trauma and C-PTSD and how to heal from it. C-PTSD is a form of PTSD that develops over time from an accumulation of “small” bad things. I had read, trained, and learned a lot about trauma before I even heard of complex trauma or C-PTSD (the “C” stands for complex). I realized I identified with people with PTSD diagnoses, but I felt like it was selfish and dramatic to even think I could have PSTD because nothing “bad enough” happened to me (turns out this is actually a symptom of trauma). Learning about complex trauma and C-PTSD started to change my mindset and it helped me begin to understand how much my childhood trauma impacted me and what I could do to begin to heal.
If you struggle to identify a “really bad” thing that happened in childhood, tell yourself: “other people had it worse,” can’t remember many details from your childhood, are drawn to understanding other people’s traumas, or just aren’t sure your childhood was “bad enough”, I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma.
#4 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn
It Didn’t Start with You discusses the behavioral and genetic ways that families transmit unresolved trauma through generations. This book for healing childhood trauma helps readers learn how trauma can be passed through generations through behavioral patterns and epigenetics (epigenetics is the way our genes express themselves, which we have the power to change!). This book for healing childhood trauma also offers some really interesting and helpful ways to identify your own inherited, intergenerational traumas and heal from those traumas.
Telling our trauma story is part of the healing process, and often that story involves multiple generations of family members experiencing the same traumas and struggles. If you want help exploring and healing intergenerational trauma, or if you want to learn about how nature and nurture interact to transmit trauma through generations, I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma.
#5 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships by Diane Poole Heller, PhD
We each have an attachment style, a pattern of how we respond and behave in relationships. We develop this pattern as children based on the relationship with our caregivers, and we carry this relational pattern into adulthood (especially in romantic relationships). Some people have a secure attachment style, a pattern of having trusting, healthy, relationships with a balance of independence and interdependence. Others have an avoidant attachment style, a pattern of being independent and not sharing their emotions. Someone with an anxious/ambivalent attachment style wants connection and closeness with others, but they’re afraid of being abandoned; this can result in constantly needing reassurance in relationships and having a hard time being independent. Finally, some people have a mix of an anxious and avoidant attachment style, this is called disorganized attachment. A person with disorganized attachment wants to be close, but they’re also afraid of being close. Their response in a relationship might be unpredictable, like pushing their partner away emotionally, but then wanting their partner close emotionally. Anyone with any attachment style could have experienced childhood trauma, but disorganized attachment is common with childhood trauma. The good news is that you can change your attachment style even as an adult. This is called “earned secure attachment.”
This book about healing childhood trauma explains more about the four attachment styles, and how childhood traumas like neglect or abuse impact attachment style. It also provides exercise and tools for healing to help readers work towards earned secure attachment.
I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma if relationships – and especially romantic relationships - are a struggle for you, or if you feel like your relationships are an emotional rollercoaster.
“The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. [...] I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on.”
— The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
#6 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, MD
The Body Keeps the Score is an accessible introduction to the science of trauma, how trauma impacts the brain and body, and what science says about various methods for healing trauma like EMDR, somatic therapies, and even yoga and theatre-based therapies.
I can get a little freaked out about things that sound “out there,” too touchy-feely, or overly spiritual because of my own trauma history. Because of that, having some understanding of the science of trauma, especially how it impacts the brain and body, really helped me. A lot of what I’ve learned about how trauma impacts the brain and body was surprising to me; in fact, the science supports a lot of stuff that I would have considered kind of “woo woo” before. If you don’t know much about the science of how trauma impacts the body and brain, The Body Keeps the Score is a great way to get that knowledge. If you have that knowledge already, then I’d choose another book on this list since this book is primarily about the science of trauma.
My personal childhood trauma experience was primarily with emotional neglect, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, and verbal abuse, and while this book is helpful for understanding the body-based impacts of abuse like this, most of the examples are focused on “easier to see” types of trauma like physical and sexual abuse and the wartime experiences of veterans. This was a little frustrating to me and it made The Body Keeps the Score difficult for me to relate to at times. I’ll also add that, cumulatively, the examples of trauma were pretty difficult to read; but the examples weren’t provided gratuitously, and they do serve a purpose in the overall narrative of the book.
Regardless of my qualms with this book for healing childhood trauma, I think a science-based understanding of how trauma impacts the brain and body is really helpful to healing childhood trauma and this book is an accessible way to gain that knowledge, so I do recommend it. In particular, I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma if you’re scientifically minded, skeptical that childhood trauma could still be impacting you today, or if you think a lot of the stuff you hear about healing sounds a little too “woo woo” for you.
#7 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown PhD, MSW
This book is basically an encyclopedia of emotions that describes 87 different emotions. Each emotion is organized into sections in a really intuitive way; each section has a title like “Places We Go When We’re Hurting” or “Places We Go When We Feel Wronged.” This organizational setup makes it really easy to find the emotion you’re looking for even if you don’t know exactly what it is.
You might think, how on earth could a book like that help with healing childhood trauma? Well, one of the common impacts of childhood trauma, especially where there was emotional neglect and abuse, is something called alexithymia. Alexithymia means that you have a hard time describing, expressing, and identifying emotions. When you experience alexithymia, you might have a hard time knowing what you’re feeling, not be able to describe your feelings, and not recognize physical sensations in your body as emotions when they are in fact emotions. For example, you might experience chest tightness or stomach pain from anxiety and mistake this for a heart attack or stomachache.
It's quite possible to not realize you’re experiencing alexithymia. Before I went to somatic therapy, if someone had asked me if I could name my emotions I would have paused, felt a little confused, and then said, “Yes, I can name my emotions.” Turns out I couldn’t actually really do a whole lot of that. As I began to connect more with the physical sensations that accompanied my emotions, I was often left pretty confused.
Enter, Atlas of the Heart. When I wondered, “What emotion is this that I’m having now?” I turned to this book for healing childhood trauma. I definitely couldn’t name 87 emotions on my own, so Atlas of the Heart opened up a whole new field of emotional experience for me. I was absolutely amazed to see an entry in this book for an emotion called “foreboding joy.” Foreboding joy is when you experience something good and start imagining what’s going to go wrong, or you worry about losing it (pre-grief) rather than leaning into the experience of joy. Until I read this book, I had no idea there was a name for that, or that it was an experience other people had too.
This book helps me to find and learn the words for the emotions I’m experiencing as they arise. That’s an important part of working with, and regulating, my emotions which is integral to healing childhood trauma.
I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma if you’re working on getting more in touch with your emotions, if you experienced emotional neglect or emotional abuse, or if relating to your own emotions is hard for you.
"This necessity is as urgent for men as it is for women, and it lies in the heart of the archetypal feminine: relatedness, receptivity, and valuing the non-rational. Until we make this shift in how we value ourselves and life, our ability to respond with intense interest and love to each other and to ideas will be fettered."
— Into the Heart of the Feminine by Massimilla Harris, PhD & Bud Harris, PhD
#8 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - Into the Heart of the Feminine: Facing the Death Mother Archetype to Reclaim Love, Strength, and Vitality by Massimilla Harris, PhD & Bud Harris, PhD
Into the Heart of the Feminine is a bit of a different take on healing childhood trauma. In this book about healing childhood trauma, two Jungian analysts explore how both women and men can heal from negative experiences with their mother in childhood. This book leads readers through the impact of negative early mothering experiences and provides a path to recovery that uses dreams and myth to transform inner experience. Into the Heart of the Feminine also includes a number of helpful anecdotes from the experiences and dreams of people the authors’ have worked with in their therapeutic practice.
I recommend this book for healing childhood trauma if your mother was emotionally absent, neglectful, and/or abusive and you’ve already read a few other books about healing childhood trauma.
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