While hardly a comprehensive list, I have compiled a list of my own top 5 books that recommend every therapist acquire and READ cover to cover. You’ll find these to be tremendous resources. You will want to add these to your collection of books about treating trauma to have a rich resource library.
Welcome! Through this blog, I seek to provide educational and support resources for mental health professionals and anyone interested in personal and professional growth and healing! Many of the resources I provide here and in other places on my blog contain affiliate partnership links that help fund my ability to provide resources and helpful information on this blog. Thanks for reading! – Lynn Louise Wonders, LPC, RPT-S, CPCS
5 Recommended Books About Treating Trauma
You can click on the images to see more information about each book about treating trauma over on Amazon.
The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Besser van der Kolk is a game changer. For all therapists, it is essential we understand the SCOPE of the effects of traumatic stress for our clients as well as for ourselves, our neighbors, our society.
Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems by Dr. Frank Anderson offers clinical case examples, summary charts, current neuroscience research, and personal stories that will enable your clients to reclaim self-connection, experience self-love, and regain the ability to connect with and love others using Internal Family Systems theory which is carefully detailed by the author.
101 Trauma-Informed Interventions: Activities, Exercises and Assignments to Move the Client and Therapy Forward by Linda Curran is a workbook full of various interventions in one concisely compiled resource to add to your collect of books about treating trauma. You’ll find these interventions to be helpful in working with a variety of clients who have experienced trauma.
What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Wynfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry is a newly available book that is helping redirect the focus of what is wrong with someone to what has happened to that person. A lens of compassion combined with neuroscience, we as mental health professionals can learn a way to help clients change the way they see themselves and others.
The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Bonnie Badenoch is a must-read for all therapists. This book offers you a brain+body-perspective on how relational neuroscience can teach us all about the ways we are connected. How we walk about in our daily lives will touch everyone, often below the level of conscious awareness. The author provides a scientifically grounded case for doing the work of opening to hemispheric balance and relational deepening.
