Top 3 Books for Healing Childhood Trauma

Today we are going to talk about my favorite 3 books that I recommend to people who are healing from childhood trauma and growing up in a dysfunctional family.

Seeing Our Trauma for What it Really Is

Learning about myself and what happened to me radically changed the trajectory of my life and the way I relate with myself. 

For some of you, you might not have physical memories of your childhood, you just have this felt sense that your needs were not met and you see the effects of trauma all over your life.

For others of you, you might have memories, but you’ve been able to write it off as “well it’s not that bad.” It’s one thing to acknowledge what your childhood was like and another to see those experiences for what they were.

I look back on my childhood and I have a whole mixture of memories. As far as everyone else knew, we were a nice and normal family, yet there were hidden, more discreet traumas that hardwired my mind and body to think, feel, and process things in a way that would sabotage me and my relationships. I learned to internalize these traumas in the form of shame and self-hatred.

It came as a surprise both to me and my parents why a perfectionistic goody-two-shoes girl would find herself in high school anorexic, cutting, attempting suicide, and deeply depressed.

I felt deep shame at the way I acted out in my relationships and I felt stuck. For a while, I just assumed I was too broken. I needed to be quarantined from the people around me–especially significant others. My codependency was beyond toxic.

It wasn’t until I learned to see my childhood for what it was that I experienced a huge shift in my life. Again, it's one thing to remember your childhood and another thing to see it for what it was.

It is pretty depressing to feel like you are simply defective and destined to live a life of depression and emotional loneliness. But when you realize that something happened to you, well, there is a great place to start from.

These 3 books helped me to finally see clearly–they helped me turn away from self-hatred and toward compassion. More than that, they gave me a pathway forward.

3 Books that Changed My Life

So here are the 3 books that changed my life, and might change yours too:

1. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Dysfunctional Families

This book does a beautiful job of helping you see clearly the effects that family dysfunction has had on you and it connects it with the behaviors you notice in yourself today (that probably cause you to feel shame). 

Another thing I LOVE about this book is it helps you identify the specific ways YOU learned to cope with the trauma and survive your childhood. We are all different and it's helpful to understand the ways we survived if we want to make sense of how our trauma causes us to show up in our relationships today.

The main point here is that this book will help you understand YOU so much better–it will give you a lens to see your childhood more clearly so that you can know what your healing path forward will involve.

2. The Body Keeps the Score

This book has literally changed the face of trauma healing for both clients and mental health professionals. This book helps you understand that trauma is not merely a cognitive thing, in fact, our bodies carry our trauma and allowing our bodies to be part of the healing process is imperative. 

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, understanding trauma is going to change everything for you. When we don’t understand how trauma works, it is so easy to let shame creep in. Understanding how trauma works is going to be a massive part of the process for understanding yourself and loving yourself despite all you’ve experienced.

3. It Didn’t Start With You

Okay, ya’ll, this book is absolutely incredible. It Didn’t Start With You uncovers the way trauma passes through the generations and lives in our bodies. This book helps you gain awareness around the trauma you inherited, and how you can break the cycle in your family.

We inherit trauma from our family and it takes both courage and grieving to break the cycle of something we never started. This was a challenging part of my own healing process…I had this felt sense that my family had dumped their trauma onto me and now I was left to clean up the mess. 

It was painful to have other people’s trauma sabotage my relationships, and eventually it got to the point where I had to say, enough is enough.

Once again, this book will help you see clearly so that you can find a healing path that will actually prove effective.

Knowledge is Power

At the end of the day, knowledge is power. When you can give yourself the chance to see clearly, you finally are able to uncover that healing path that will actually change your life. 

So often, people come to therapy trying to fight the wrong battle. Understanding the effects of what happened to us (and our families) helps orient our healing in an effective direction.

Like I mentioned in our previous video of “How to Know if Therapy Is Right For You (right now)”, taking the step to understand yourself and your childhood better is going to set yourself up to have big wins in the therapy process. 

So go ahead and check out any one of these books and you will add clarity, momentum, and direction to your healing process.