The Best Books on Trauma

Psychiatry · The foundation

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman · 1992

Herman, a psychiatrist at Harvard, put the trauma of war veterans next to the trauma of women who had survived rape and domestic abuse and showed they were the same injury. She proposed the idea of complex trauma, from harm that goes on for months or years, and described recovery in three stages: safety, remembering and mourning, and reconnection.

Every other book on this page stands on this one. It is older and denser than the bestsellers, and it is still the clearest account of why trauma is not only something that happens inside one person, but something that happens between people, and in a society that would rather not know.

Psychiatry · The famous one

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk · 2014

A psychiatrist’s account of thirty years treating trauma, arguing that it lives on in the body and the nervous system, not just in memory, and surveying treatments from EMDR to yoga and theatre. It has spent years on the bestseller lists and is the book most people mean when they talk about trauma.

I include it because it changed how millions of people understand themselves. I also want you to read it knowing two things: some researchers argue it overstates how trauma is stored in the body and how well some of the therapies are proven, and in 2018 van der Kolk was dismissed from the trauma centre he founded after allegations about how he treated staff, which he disputed.

Every book by Bessel van der Kolk →Books like The Body Keeps the Score →

What Happened to You?

Bruce D. Perry & Oprah Winfrey · 2021

A child psychiatrist and Oprah Winfrey in conversation about how early experience shapes the brain, built around one change of question: from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” Winfrey brings her own childhood; Perry brings the neuroscience.

The gentlest way into the subject, and the one I give people first. It was my book club pick when it came out, and the question in its title is the most useful single idea on this page.

Read my full recommendation →Books like What Happened to You? →

Case stories · Childhood

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

Bruce D. Perry & Maia Szalavitz · 2006

Perry’s earlier book, written with the journalist Maia Szalavitz: the stories of children he treated after severe neglect and violence, including the boy of the title, who spent his early years in a dog cage. Each case shows what trauma does to a developing brain, and what helped.

Harder to read than What Happened to You? and more convincing, because you see it working on real children. What stays with me is how often the cure was not a technique but a relationship.

Medicine · Childhood adversity

The Deepest Well

Nadine Burke Harris · 2018

A pediatrician in a poor San Francisco neighbourhood notices that her patients with the hardest childhoods are also the sickest, and follows the thread to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which linked childhood adversity to adult heart disease, cancer and early death. She later became California’s first Surgeon General.

The book that makes the case in the language of medicine rather than therapy. If you want to understand why childhood trauma is a public health question and not only a private one, start here.

Every book by Nadine Burke Harris →

When the Body Says No

Gabor Maté · 2003

A Vancouver physician argues that chronic stress and a lifetime of suppressing emotions play a part in illnesses from autoimmune disease to cancer and ALS, using his patients’ stories and his own. His later book, The Myth of Normal, widens the same argument to society.

Maté asks the questions most doctors do not have time for, and the stories are unforgettable. Read it as a provocation rather than a proof: the link he draws between personality and disease is much debated, and he would not want anyone to blame themselves for being ill.

Read the summary →Every book by Gabor Maté →

Therapy · Generational trauma

My Grandmother’s Hands

Resmaa Menakem · 2017

A therapist in Minneapolis writes about racialised trauma as something carried in the body and passed down through families and communities, Black, white and police alike, and offers body-based practices for working with it.

The book on this page about trauma that is inherited rather than lived through. Even where you disagree, it is impossible to read without seeing your own body differently.

Every book by Resmaa Menakem →

Psychology · Family

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Lindsay C. Gibson · 2015

A clinical psychologist describes four kinds of emotionally immature parent and the loneliness of growing up with them, even in a family where nothing obviously terrible happened.

Not every childhood wound is a dramatic one. This is the book for the reader who suspects something was missing but cannot point to an event, and it is one people pass on to each other.

Every book by Lindsay C. Gibson →

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl · 1946

Frankl, a psychiatrist, survived Auschwitz and Dachau subcamps, and wrote this within a year of liberation: what he observed of how people endured the camps, and the therapy he built from it.

The oldest book here and still the most quoted. It is about trauma at its most extreme, and its answer, that a person can still choose what the suffering will mean, is the one the rest of this page keeps circling back to.

Read my full recommendation →Every book by Viktor Frankl →

The Choice

Edith Eger · 2017

Eger was sixteen when she was sent to Auschwitz. She became a psychologist in America and, decades later, wrote this: part memoir, part stories of her patients, and an account of how long her own healing took.

Frankl shows what survival looks like; Eger shows what the years afterwards look like. Read them together.

Read my full recommendation →Every book by Edith Eger →

Memoir · Assault

Know My Name

Chanel Miller · 2019

Miller was known to the world as Emily Doe, the woman assaulted by a Stanford student in 2015, whose victim impact statement was read by millions. Here she tells the story under her own name: the assault, the trial, and the years of trying to get her life back.

The most precise account I know of what happens after: in the body, in a courtroom, in a family. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and it deserved to.

Every book by Chanel Miller →

Novel · Memory

Beloved

Toni Morrison · 1987

Years after escaping slavery, Sethe lives in a house in Ohio haunted by the daughter she killed rather than let her be taken back. Then a young woman called Beloved arrives. Morrison drew on the real case of Margaret Garner, and the novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

The one novel on this list, and the reason it is here is a word Morrison invented: rememory, a memory so strong that it exists outside you and others can walk into it. No non-fiction book describes trauma better.

Every book by Toni Morrison →