Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

Healing the wounds of sexual trauma has long been considered by many psychotherapists to be one of the most challenging tasks a person will ever face. The good news, teaches Dr. Peter A. Levine, is that new and more effective tools are emerging. On Sexual Healing, Dr. Levine, a pioneer in the field of healing trauma, teaches you his innovative series of body-based practices to release the sexual trauma of your past.

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one’s self-destructive behavior, you may be codependent—and you may find yourself in this book. With personal reflections, exercises, and instructive stories drawn from Beattie’s own life and the lives of those she’s counseled, Codependent No More helps you break old patterns and maintain healthy boundaries, and offers a clear and achievable path to healing, hope, freedom, and happiness.

Shame is one of the most destructive of human emotions. If you suffered childhood physical or sexual abuse, you may experience such intense feelings of shame that it almost seems to define you as a person. In order to begin healing, it's important for you to know that it wasn't your fault. In this gentle guide, therapist and childhood abuse expert Beverly Engel presents a mindfulness and compassion-based therapeutic approach to help you overcome the debilitating shame that keeps you tied to the past.

In this shared voyage of self-discovery, we'll explore how child abuse continues to steal our adult happiness. I'll suggest exercises and ask you questions. Why? Because you - not me or anyone else - are the world's leading expert on you. This guide is about you - your past, your present, your future. We'll look at insights, available to us through our dreams and even through fairy tales. We'll discuss whistle-blowing - to our families, to our abuser, and by writing a memoir.

Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

This riveting memoir by Laura Davis, author of The Courage to Heal, examines the endurance of mother-daughter love, how memory protects and betrays us, and the determination it takes to fulfill a promise when ghosts from the past come knocking. When she published The Courage to Heal in 1988, Laura Davis helped more than a million women work through the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. But her decision to go public with her grandfather’s incest deepened an already painful estrangement with her mother, Temme.

If you are healing from your history of childhood sexual abuse, you may be feeling like a hamster running around on a wheel, unable to escape your own self-destructive tendencies. Trust and superficial intimate relationships are common in adulthood for many survivors. You will discover the tool that helped the author to lower the effects of the trauma and brought her to the emotional state needed to deal with every aspect of life.

As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over 20 years. It Didn't Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms.

Is having 'somebody to love' the most important thing in your life? Do you constantly believe that with 'the right man' you would no longer feel depressed or lonely? Are you bored with 'nice guys' who are open, honest, and dependable? If being in love means being in pain, this book was written for you. Therapist Robin Norwood describes loving too much as a pattern of thoughts and behavior, which certain women develop as a response to problems from childhood.

The causes of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grew up in houses that were not homes-in families that were as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous. If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated, and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul, and body. This book is a practical guide to recovering from lingering childhood trauma. It is copiously illustrated with examples of the author's and his clients' journeys of recovering.

With Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters, Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of the smash #1 best-seller Toxic Parents, offers a powerful look at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters - and provides clear, effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy.

Childhood sexual abuse (or child sexual abuse/CSA) is not only an assault on the body—it is an assault on the mind and on the spirit. It is an insult to the victim’s integrity, her self-esteem, his very being. Besides imposing a significantly higher risk of conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sexual exploitation, intimate partner violence, suicidality, substance abuse, and learning & educational difficulties, the most devastating consequence of childhood sexual abuse is shame.

This best-selling book examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain. Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound audiobook has provided millions of people with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.

When Motherless Daughters was published 20 years ago, it unleashed a tsunami of healing awareness. When Denna Babul and Karin Luise couldn't find the equivalent book for fatherlessness, The Fatherless Daughter Project was born. The book will set fatherless women on the path to growth and fulfillment by helping them to understand how their losses have impacted their lives.

In this remarkable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward draws on case histories and the real-life voices of adult children of toxic parents to help you free yourself from the frustrating patterns of your relationship with your parents---and discover a new world of self-confidence, inner strength, and emotional independence.

Whether we've experienced small setbacks or major traumas, we are all influenced by memories and experiences we may not remember or don't fully understand. Getting Past Your Past offers practical procedures that demystify the human condition and empower listeners looking to achieve real change. An easy conversational style, humor, and fascinating real life stories make it simple to understand the brain science behind why we get stuck in various ways and what we can about it.

In Codependent No More, Melody Beattie introduced the world to the term codependency. In The New Codependency, she clears up misconceptions, identifies how codependent behavior has changed, and provides a new generation with a road map to wellness.

Psychotherapist and breakup expert Rachel A. Sussman, LCSW, reveals the secrets every woman needs to get her life back on track. Drawing on hundreds of counseling sessions she's conducted with women at all stages of recovery, Sussman developed a proven three-phase process for healing from a breakup.

Like a constant friend, this collection of meditations is a source of strength and reassurance designed to speak to women like you, women in relationships with angry and controlling men. It helps you to digest what is happening a piece at a time, so you can gain clarity, safety, and freedom.

Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one’s self-destructive behavior, you may be codependent—and you may find yourself in this book. With personal reflections, exercises, and instructive stories drawn from Beattie’s own life and the lives of those she’s counseled, Codependent No More helps you break old patterns and maintain healthy boundaries, and offers a clear and achievable path to healing, hope, freedom, and happiness.

Can my partner abuse me and still be a good parent? Should I stay with my partner for my children's sake? How should I talk to my children about the abuse and help them heal? Am I a bad mother? Mothers in physically or emotionally abusive relationships ask themselves these questions every day. Whether it's physical or "just" emotional abuse, whether it's aimed at them or you, whether they see or hear it, your kids need you.

Have you recently walked away from a date or a conversation feeling uncomfortable or violated? Are you looking for ways to set limits with your spouse, kids, parents, or boss? This essential guide to setting and respecting boundaries is for anyone wanting to better understand themselves and others. Just as a cut in our skin causes pain and injury, a breach of any of our physical, emotional, or sexual boundaries can be very harmful to our bodies and minds.

Psychotherapist Terrence Real offers an important and compelling look at the silent epidemic of depression among men and shows, with compassion and clarity, what can be done to break this vicious cycle.

The difficulties experienced by adult children of narcissists can manifest themselves in many ways - for example, physical self-loathing that takes the form of overeating, anorexia, or bulimia; a self-destructive streak that causes poor job performance and rocky personal relationships; or a struggle with the self that is perpetuated in the adult's interaction with his or her own children. These dilemmas are both common and correctable, Elan Golomb tells us.

In Love Is a Choice, best-selling doctors Robert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier walk you through their 10 proven stages to recovery from codependency that results from external circumstances. Humans are susceptible to codependency because of our sinful tendency to use defense mechanisms to fool ourselves. In codependent relationships, deceitful games are played, and important Christian principles are often taken out of context and abused.

Coupling stories of abused women and abusive men from her own case studies, Patricia Evans here gives you the tools you need to transform your relationship. Most important, she assures you that such a transformation is possible—given the right circumstances. Evans also helps you determine if your abuser really has changed—or if he’s merely creating the illusion of change. And if he hasn’t changed, Evans helps you decide whether it’s time to leave the relationship—and what to do when it is.

Children today live in an unpredictable, disruptive, and often violent world. Many of them live in two different homes with different sets of expectations. They face bullying at school and online. They hear news of school shootings, and racially or religiously motivated violence. They may have lost a friend or a loved one. As parents, the impulse to protect our children is strong, but that very protection can end up handicapping them for life. Rather than seek to save them from the hard things, parents must teach their kids how to cope with and rise above their problems.

Elaine Aron follows up her best sellers on the highly sensitive person with a groundbreaking new book on the undervalued self. She explains that self-esteem results from having a healthy balance of love and power in our lives. Readers will learn to incorporate love into situations that seem to require power and deal with power struggles that mask themselves as issues of love.

Based on in-depth interviews and her workshops for partners across the country, Laura Davis offers practical advice and encouragement to all partners - girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, and lovers - trying to support the survivors in their lives while tending to their own needs along the way. She shows couples how to deepen compassion, improve communication, and develop an understanding of healing as a shared activity.

If you are healing from your history of childhood sexual abuse, you may be feeling like a hamster running around on a wheel, unable to escape your own self-destructive tendencies. Trust and superficial intimate relationships are common in adulthood for many survivors. You will discover the tool that helped the author to lower the effects of the trauma and brought her to the emotional state needed to deal with every aspect of life.

Shame is one of the most destructive of human emotions. If you suffered childhood physical or sexual abuse, you may experience such intense feelings of shame that it almost seems to define you as a person. In order to begin healing, it's important for you to know that it wasn't your fault. In this gentle guide, therapist and childhood abuse expert Beverly Engel presents a mindfulness and compassion-based therapeutic approach to help you overcome the debilitating shame that keeps you tied to the past.

In this shared voyage of self-discovery, we'll explore how child abuse continues to steal our adult happiness. I'll suggest exercises and ask you questions. Why? Because you - not me or anyone else - are the world's leading expert on you. This guide is about you - your past, your present, your future. We'll look at insights, available to us through our dreams and even through fairy tales. We'll discuss whistle-blowing - to our families, to our abuser, and by writing a memoir.

Sexual abuse knows no religious or social boundaries. The Wounded Heart is an intensely personal and specific look at this form of abuse. Dr. Allender explores the secret lament of the soul damaged by sexual abuse and lays hold of the hope buried there by the one whose unstained image we all bear. Includes information about false memory issues.

Childhood sexual abuse (or child sexual abuse/CSA) is not only an assault on the body—it is an assault on the mind and on the spirit. It is an insult to the victim’s integrity, her self-esteem, his very being. Besides imposing a significantly higher risk of conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sexual exploitation, intimate partner violence, suicidality, substance abuse, and learning & educational difficulties, the most devastating consequence of childhood sexual abuse is shame.

It is said that the true test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. As many as one in four girls and one in six boys experience sexual abuse during childhood, and it's estimated that as many as half of the incidents are never reported. This means that countless millions in our societies, both children and adults, carry this complex, often hidden pain. What does the path to healing look like for survivors? And how can ministry leaders, pastors, and counselors best help them as they walk this difficult road? Drawing on both his own experience and his wife's experience as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, minister and lecturer Tim Hein offers his expertise.

If your partner is a survivor of sexual trauma, they may experience anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or feel triggered by intimate situations. And you may feel confused or unsure of how to support them. This gentle guide will give you the tools you need to help nurture intimacy and trust, and cultivate a secure relationship. In Loving Someone Who Has Sexual Trauma, marriage, family, and sex therapist Megan Lara Negendank offers self-compassion and attachment-based communication skills to support your partner.

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

Within every community, toxic people can be found hiding in families, couples, companies, and places of worship. The cryptic nature of psychological abuse involves repetitious mind games played by one individual or a group of people. Psychological abuse leaves no bruises. There are no broken bones. There are no holes in the walls. The bruises, brokenness, and holes are held tightly within the target of the abuse.