Books like Trauma by Ruth Leys

A groundbreaking work that explains how trauma rewires the brain and body, and presents evidence‑based therapies—from neurofeedback to yoga—that unlock the mind’s natural capacity for healing.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris explains how childhood stress and trauma can create lasting health problems and offers ways to disrupt the cycle for both children and their families.

Written to help guide clinicians through the maze of trauma treatment, this practical manual is effectively a structured toolkit of techniques and protocols to assist therapists in their challenging work with trauma survivors. With an emphasis upon cognitive-behavioral interventions, it provides resources and guidance for any psychotherapist working with any client. The manual is divided into three main sections, corresponding to Herman’s (1992) Triphasic Model: Safety and Stabilization, Remembrance and Mourning, and Reconnection. For each of the three phases, it presents an array of techniques, protocols, and interventions, described clearly, thoroughly, and in a structured, easy-to-follow manner, in the four categories of cognitive, behavioral, body-oriented, and emotional/relational. This book promises to become an essential resource in trauma practice

First published in 1924, Otto Rank's *The Trauma of Birth* took as its starting point a note that Freud added to his The Interpretation of Dreams : "Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety". Rank set out to identify "the ultimate biological basis of the psychical," the very "nucleus of the unconscious" (p. xxiii). For him this was the physical event of birth, whereby the infant passes from a state of perfectly contented union with the mother to a state of parlous separation via an oppressive experience of asphyxiation, constriction, confinement in the vaginal canal, and so on-all feelings recognizable in anxiety states of every kind. It was the struggle against this traumatic experience of birth, in Rank's account, that structured the fantasy life of the child, including the disavowal of the difference between the sexes, infantile sexual theories, and oedipal scenarios. Castration anxiety was a defensive derivative of the anxiety associated with the birth trauma.