Recommended Books
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All books
All books
- Books for Clients, Consumers & Loved Ones
- Books Co-Authored by Dr. Joseph Spinazzola
- Books About Children, Adolescents & Families
- Books on Working with Adults
- Books on Mind, Body & Complex Trauma
- Books on the Intersections of Trauma with Race, Culture & Gender
- Classics
Wonderful, easy to read book that explains what complex trauma is, how it can affect people and how it can be treated. Emphasizes the intersection of addictions and complex trauma for many survivors.
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This illustrated children’s book explores the effects of chronic emotional abuse and pathways to resilience. Help for parents and caregivers on how to support children impacted by bullying and other maltreatment
This illustrated book is a wonderful resource for parents and other caregivers to support children impacted by complex trauma and other frightening life events to understand the influence of these experiences on problem behaviors and physical ailments, find words to express their feelings, and improve coping.
A classic resource that remains highly relevant today for parents and other adults supporting the healthy development of boys.
Explores trauma in adolescents and young adults. Emphasizes the role of hidden trauma in driving risk behaviors, including substance abuse,self-harm and academic problems. A Guide for multidisciplinary providers to help at-risk youth.
An acclaimed personal memoir and guide to empowerment and healing for women who have suffered rape and sexual abuse.
The Trauma Tool Kit is a holistic compendium of techniques and resources to help people heal from PTSD and traumatic stress. Compellingly written as a practical resource for clients, this well-regarded book integrates traditional Western medicine, ancient eastern healing practices, contemporary mind-body approaches, and spirituality to help guide recovery from trauma.
In this insightful exploration of human vulnerability and growth, the author explores various ways – through invalidation, emotional neglect, abuse, bullying, societal expectations - that individuals disconnect from their true self beginning at an early age. For many, early wounding leads to a long-term struggle with shame, and we come to question our own worth. Through vivid storytelling and personal narrative, Dr Flanagan describes the ways that we strive to prove that we are good enough through professional achievement or affirmation in our relationships, while chronically struggling to care for ourselves. The author illuminates three paths by which we can learn to (re)connect to our truest self: understanding our worthiness, finding a sense of belonging in authentic relationships, and engaging in life with purpose. Dr. Flanagan invites the reader, through spiritual exploration and self-reflection, to embrace vulnerability in order to pursue a full and meaningful life.
A recently published collection of papers on treating trauma in the context of pastoral counseling. Includes an important chapter by Drs. Joseph Spinazzola and Jana Pressley that explores the intersection of complex trauma and spirituality and illustrates the use of CBP in faith-based trauma treatment.
The definitive scholarly book on complex traumatic stress disorder affecting adults. Includes an important chapter by Drs. Joseph Spinazzola and John Briere on the assessment of complex trauma in adult therapy.
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This is the first book that focuses on treating adult survivors of the most subtle and insidious forms of complex childhood trauma: emotional abuse and neglect. This book creatively introduces CBP, a new treatment model for complex trauma. It follows the lives, relationships and internal worlds of four characters-- two clients and their therapists—over the course of extended therapy. Uniquely, this book devotes as much attention to the perceptions, choices, mistakes and growth of the therapists as the clients themselves. It also carefully examines assumptions and implicit biases about gender, race, sexuality, culture and social privilege. Dr. Spinazzola and his colleagues distill three decades of wisdom gained from work with hundreds of adults enduring legacies of complex childhood trauma. While written primarily for therapists, this book may also be of value to adult clients, their loved ones, and others seeking an authentic view into the trauma therapy process.
This comprehensive two-volume resource is an essential compendium on the causes and effects of child violence and trauma. Intentionally minimizing psychological jargon, it was written to be comprehensible and of practical relevance to diverse multidisciplinary providers including educators, first responders, law enforcement, child welfare and the judicial system. It may also be of value to parents and other caregivers seeking more information on this topic. Volume One concludes with an important chapter by Drs. Joseph Spinazzola and Jana Pressley on the developmental consequences of complex trauma in childhood and adolescence.
ARC is a comprehensive model for complex trauma intervention with children, families and systems. This newly updated second edition contains dozens of additional worksheets and resources for therapists and caregivers, and describes use of ARC with diverse clinical populations and settings, including schools, day care centers and residential treatment facilities.
This activity-rich workbook for children and accompanying practitioner’s guide showcases Real Life Heroes, a strength-based and creative-arts rich approach to complex trauma intervention with children, adolescents and their adult caregivers and mentors.
This book introduces ITCT-C, an assessment-driven, evidence-based treatment approach for complex trauma with children and families.
A poignant, case-driven account of one therapist’s highly personal journey to help girls who had endured complex sexual trauma find ways to communicate their previously unspeakable experiences.
The definitive scholarly book on complex traumatic stress disorder affecting children and adolescents.
This book describes ITCT-A, an assessment-driven, evidence-based treatment approach for complex trauma with adolescents and young adults.
This clinically-focused manual features an innovative trauma intervention model – Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Therapy (SMART) which focuses on embodied, sensory experience as its primary mechanism of therapeutic change. SMART incorporates occupational therapy concepts, techniques, and equipment into a trauma-focused psychotherapy treatment model that can be practically implemented by mental health professionals. The intervention model was explicitly developed to alter chronic patterns of trauma-induced somatic dysregulation by incorporating sensory inputs from the vestibular system, proprioception, and touch (tactile system) to facilitate the healing process. Through poignant case examples, the authors illustrate how these “movement senses” contribute to an individual’s sense of agency, self-regulation, groundedness and identity across time.
SMART has been implemented with a wide range of clients and service settings, from outpatient and home-based work with mothers and their toddlers and young children, to older adolescents with developmental impairment or severe emotional disturbance in residential treatment settings. It has also been incorporated into nontraditional programming, include psychosocial child-care, and play groups in community center, pastoral and aftercare programs.
The book includes helpful charts and beautiful colored insets that summarize therapist skills and illustrate various youth trauma symptom characteristics and state shifts. Overall, it is an extremely valuable clinical resource for therapists undertaking complex trauma intervention with children, adolescents, and their caregivers.
This book delineates a strengths-based, therapeutic alliance-driven approach that builds upon and updates classic phase-oriented treatment of complex trauma with adults
The definitive clinician’s guide to understanding and treatment of trauma-related dissociation.
This book introduces AEDP, a short-term psychodynamic therapy relevant to complex trauma treatment with adults. It emphasizes empathic attunement to unresolved emotions, sensations and impulses associated with formative experiences of attachment disruption, abuse, betrayal and neglect.
Newly published skills training manual for IFS, an evidence-based treatment that promotes healing by improving communication and compassion between parts of self that have been fragmented by complex trauma. Describes uses of the IFS model for clients contending with a range of mental health concerns, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and eating disorders.
This modular session manual features the most evidence-based model of phase-oriented treatment of complex trauma with adults. It emphasizes emotion regulation and interpersonal skill building followed by narrative processing of traumatic memories.
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This clinically-focused guide instructs therapists in how to best understand high risk behavior through the lens of complex trauma and survival-based coping. Briere explains often misunderstood and maligned symptoms – such as self-injury, compulsive sexual behaviors, binge eating, reactive aggression – as distress reduction behaviors. Illuminating the process through which trauma survivors learn to numb, block, or sooth otherwise intolerable pain, Briere identifies early childhood relational trauma (especially involving child neglect or caregiver disengagement) as a leading area of vulnerability for the development of high-risk behaviors. Trauma impacted youth find themselves in the midst of chronic, high levels of stress without the supportive care of adults to aid in developing skills to self-regulate. Meanwhile, disrupted neurobiology from this persistent arousal leaves the nervous system more vulnerable to being easily overwhelmed. When the distress persists throughout critical years of child development, such individuals often do not develop sufficient skills to reduce distress or tolerate painful memories later in adulthood. Further, those who have painful interpersonal experiences throughout youth often carry these experiences into adulthood, leaving them more sensitive in their adult relationships to the perception of criticism and rejection. This dynamic can lead to reactions that often appear out of proportion to the outside observer, perpetuating a cycle of negative relational patterns and behaviors. This insightful book is a highly useful addition to the complex trauma treatment literature, with a focus on the safety and stabilization. The author provides both a conceptual frame for formulation and a wealth of tools for clinicians working with high risk clients. He advocates for a curious clinical stance, and gives practical suggestions and resources for using functional analysis of triggered responses to craft effective treatment plans.
This new critically acclaimed book exposes the long-term medical consequences of unaddressed complex childhood trauma and envisions pathways for healing.
The leading clinical compendium of mindfulness-based approaches to trauma treatment.
This international bestseller illuminates the imprint of complex trauma on body and mind and illustrates innovative avenues of recovery.
This practical and easy to read book guides therapists, yoga instructors and clients in use of TC-TSY, the first empirically-supported, trauma-sensitive yoga model for adults and teens. This book includes illustrated instructions for gentle exercises that can be practiced at the yoga studio, in therapy or at home.
A practical guide for therapists and their clients in use of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, the most widely practiced, somatically-based intervention for adult survivors of complex childhood trauma and attachment disruption.
The most comprehensive and clinically sophisticated book to date on use of brain biofeedback (clinical neurofeedback) with individuals impacted by complex developmental trauma.
The most comprehensive and clinically sophisticated book to date on use of brain biofeedback (clinical neurofeedback) with individuals impacted by complex developmental trauma.
In the form of a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehesi Coates shares a powerful commentary on the ways in which racism, historical trauma, and ongoing structural violence live on in the embodied experience of black American individuals and communities. Coates recounts how the social construct of race evolved in society through historic and present-day domination of the bodies of African American people. Through the narratives of his own life and extended family experiences, Coates describes adults attempting to protect youth through parenting practices of corporal punishment, and youth attempting to feel mastery and safety in the world through their stance, gait, music, and neighborhood and peer affiliation. The author names fear as the internalized experience that shines through the behavior, relational patterns, and musical lyrics of those impacted by historical trauma, and poignantly portrays how the human body holds and reenacts fear and trauma, particularly when the bodies of people of color have been defined as “other” and lesser-than. Coates walks the reader through his own life, from his childhood in Baltimore witnessing violence and internalizing fear and racism, to his experience of connection and community at Howard University, the vicarious traumatization of ongoing exposure to racism, and the ever-changing experience of parenthood as the father of an African-American male.
In this insightful resource, the author examines racial trauma in a manner that focuses on the embodied experience of pain. Menakem skillfully describes how the body holds memories, emotions, and sensations, as we viscerally re-experience past trauma when triggered in the present. He further illustrates the ways in which the fight, flight, and collapse responses of BIPOC are shaped in the broader societal context of racism and white body supremacy. Connecting the field of historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, and epigenetic trauma, Menakem guides the reader to understand how the historical trauma of both black and white individuals over centuries has shaped modern day power dynamics and systemic racism. Further, he applies this same dynamic to the culture of law enforcement professionals and speaks to the complicated dynamics between law enforcement and persons of color. The author integrates meditative and somatic regulation practices into each chapter, guiding the reader in self-reflection around triggering experiences and building capacity for greater self-regulation. Beyond individual change, Menakem also calls for creation of culture that can practice the vulnerability and discomfort of acknowledging racism.
This educational and compassionate resource is focused on body-based intervention for the cumulative experiences of racial stress experienced by BIPOC. Dr. Parker discusses the chronic impact that race-based stress takes on persons of color, particularly when such distress goes unnamed and unacknowledged over the course of time. She also illuminates the nature of compensatory coping strategies which have taken an individual and collective toll on the nervous systems of BIPOC. Parker weaves insight about historical trauma and race-based traumatic stress throughout each chapter as she outlines the relational, physiological, and identity-shifting benefits of restorative yoga. In each chapter, she includes a section with self-reflection questions to promote deeper self-awareness about embodied trauma impact and self-care needs. The final chapter illustrates a variety of restorative yoga poses, with concrete suggestions to incorporate this healing practice into daily life.
This book shares poignant stories of survival to illuminate pathways to recovery from trauma for individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.
The foremost scholarly compendium for health providers and therapists working with transgender, gender nonconforming, gender variant and gender fluid clients.
An essential, case-driven guide to clinical practice with Native Peoples. Addresses many important topics that intersect with complex trauma, including intergenerational, ancestral and systemic trauma, societal and internalized oppression, and substance abuse.
This powerful book reexamines violence and maladaptive behavior in the African-American community from the vantage point of systemic trauma, structural violence and social oppression.
This groundbreaking book relays the powerful complex trauma stories of young men of color living in the intersection of chronic poverty, racial oppression, and community violence. Physician and public health expert John Rich, M.D., M.P.H., sets out to understand the narratives of his patients after observing young men entering his emergency room with physical injuries resulting from community violence and leaving with patched-up bodies weighed down by the hidden effects of psychological trauma.
Rich illuminates his patients’ chronically aroused nervous systems, pervasive symptoms of PTSD, and perilous efforts to regulate stress and seek self-preservation through substance use and aggression. He depicts young men who feel invisible and unknown, struggling to survive in a world with ever present threat and little guidance. At the same time, the stories he shares demonstrate the tremendous resilience of youth and young adults: fighting to navigate the impact of chronic and undiagnosed traumatic stress through writing, poetry, and companionship, determined to carve out personal identity and meaning despite the odds.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time reframes chronic community violence through the lens of intergenerational trauma, structural violence, and systemic trauma: from caregivers impaired by their own untreated trauma, schools ill-equipped to serve vulnerable youth, and, above all, a larger society that views these young men as dangerous and “other.” This modern classic rejects societal characterizations of young black males impacted by community violence as “sick” or “bad.” Instead, it understands them to be injured youth who are in need and worthy of support to promote healing and help break the vicious cycle of violence and trauma.
In this edited, research-based volume, experts on racism and intersectionality contribute chapters examining the effects of racial discriminatory treatment on BIPOC across various contexts. The authors explore the deleterious impact of racism on lifespan development, education, vocation, and the overall health and wellness of persons of color. The final section of the book includes chapters focused on intervention models for individual and community-based healing from racial trauma, as well as chapters focused on social and educational policy change.
Combining historical analysis and autobiographical storytelling, Kendi dissects the topics of racism and antiracism with an ardent call for cultural transformation. As a scholar on race and social policy, he examines the construct of race with the intersecting identities of gender, class, and sexuality. The author critiques the way in which both subtle and overtly discriminatory beliefs have been shaped and maintained throughout history through popular culture, scientific theories, and political policy. He advocates for precision in the way institutional racism is discussed, with a call to focus on policy as the most powerful emphasis for meaningful and lasting change. His book charges the reader to consider that racist policy brings harm to all members of a culture, and that working toward antiracism will create a more equitable society overall.
An unheralded classic, this book offers an innovative approach to psychotherapy that centers around exploration and processing of individual and collective emotions and beliefs prevalent in adult survivors of complex childhood trauma.
A classic workbook on vicarious trauma, secondary traumatization, compassion fatigue, and strategies to promote self-care for therapists and other helping professionals serving individuals impacted by complex trauma.
The landmark book on psychological trauma. This groundbreaking book is foundational reading for therapists, clients and anyone else interested in understanding the complexity of adaptation to and recovery from trauma.
This book is foundational reading on the evolving relationship between dissociative coping, pathological dissociation and complex developmental trauma.
Inspiring stories of women’s resilience in the aftermath of childhood complex trauma. This timeless book is relevant to mental health clinicians and clients alike.
This classic manual features the first empirically supported treatment model to address the complex relationship between trauma and addictions.